Every picture is a memory. Every time we press the shutter on the camera we are freezing a moment of history so we can preserve it forever. It sounds monumentous doesn't it, but it's not: Facebook will certainly tell you otherwise. I log on each day to see the myriad of photos that my so-called 'friends' vomit onto my homepage. Not only do people upload a sequence of the same picture - I have two of them so why not use them - but the other people in the picture will also post their versions of it. The result? Monster albums clogging up the internet providing the CIA with plenty of material should anyone need blackmailing in the future...


It is an age-old question, though. How do we make our holiday photos interesting to the general public? How do we step away from the necessity to have 'been there' to really appreciate someone else's pictures? And, while we're at it, how can we remove this insane fashion for de-tagging and portraying this hideously false image on Facebook? There is no hard and fast solution - no tried and tested method to solve this, but I think I may have hit upon a compromise.


May I invite you to read on...

Saturday, 14 January 2012

Photoshop Frippery

I'm not the best person to ask about Photoshop. I can't use it. If I fettle my photos it's by adjusting brightness and contrast, but I heavily rely on having taken a decent enough picture in the first place. My camera has colour-select options so I can choose a colour I want to emphasise and leave the rest black and white; I can make the colours vivid; I can blur the background; I can even set my camera up so I smile and the picture is taken automatically. Oh, oh oh it's magic!

So when my pictures arrive in Photoshop in their droves, most of the work has been done for me. I use it principally to save photos which are on the brink of deletion:

What started off as a washed-out mediocre picture of Kelly Jones of the Stereophonics becomes a bold iconic image worthy of the Pop Art era. Well at least I think so - it has been my desktop wallpaper for the last two-and-a-half years.

So Photoshop came to the rescue and put the finishing touches to what was never going to hang on a wall into something I'm really quite proud of. But then again I only fettled the brightness and contrast.

All this is bringing me nicely to my latest jumping photo. I didn't take it. I took about a hundred that evening. There was a beautiful sunset and I decided to go out with a couple of friends for a walk along the beach. The hazy sun left a lot of glare on the camera lens and silhouetted everything in the foreground. Ok so it might not be everyone's cup of tea, but it certainly makes for some effective pictures:

The Silhouette
West Sands, St Andrews, May 2009 

Still, even though it's a nice picture, I think it could be made a little better... With a bit of brightness/contrast fettlage I'd be quite happy to put that on my wall, and, to keep the Stereophonics theme, I reckon they could use that picture for the cover for their greatest hits: A Decade in the Sun.

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