At brunch, I noticed a man holding a baby. It was pretty cute as babies go, I suppose, not gushing any effluvia, but baby pictures are a dime a dozen and I leave them in the hands of competent photographers. I’m just a grungy iPhoneographer, so I went for the interesting cross of their arms, so different in size, color and texture. Since the arms are the point here, the rest I blurred to draw the eye in.
– the Daily Grunge
Another mushroom (maybe it’s a toadstool, a word I like much better) found in the early morning. Really, mushrooms are so marvelously detailed! You need to get close to them to see the glory. Get right down on your knees and experience a mushroom. Turn it over. Get your camera right up close to it, and try different angles. Take 10 pictures of one mushroom and make each one different. When you edit the images, crop them and see what happens to your ordinary little fungus. You will find something spectacular hiding in there.
– the Daily Grunge
Soooo fascinating. It’s been wet here in NC, by which I mean it rained for more than 20 minutes at a time in between hot sun. This dampness means … mushrooms, LOTS of mushrooms, and so many different varieties. I never pick and eat them, although some look mightly tasty and some look frankly obsene. Those are my favorites, pictorially.
This little beauty was enhanced with Jazz, at least 3 effects which I can’t remember any more, I just jacked things up and down and cropped until it looked amazing. And then stopped editing. You reach a point of diminishing returns. With extreme closeups, I like to get it to where it has an ambiguous look. When it looked like hardened lava, I knew I was done.
– the Daily Grunge
A singing bowl. These are marvelous objects: run a wooden handle around the top edge and you get an amazing resonating hummmmmmm. It can take a little practice and the sound you get will vary with the quality of the bowl, the metals used, and the skill of the player. This particular bowl is in the yoga studio where I take classes.
My first experience with these bowls was at The Floating Lotus, an import store in Rockport, Massachusetts. They have many singing bowls, one big enough to stand in. The owner gave me a good dose of the thing, telling me it would awaken my chakras in a profound way, and I was thinking “yadda yadda yadda”. But after a couple of minutes standing in this giant vibrating bowl, I felt fundamentally different somehow, I can’t explain it, but it straightened something out, some wrinkle I hadn’t been aware of. I remember floating around the rest of the day like I was on painkillers.
Your results may vary.
The picture was enhanced with Jazz, my new go-to. Bloom, burnt-photo grunge, and contrast effects applied.
– the Daily Grunge
Another version of a photo I did months ago, this time reworked in Jazz. I’m using it more and more because it not only has a good set of editing tools (crop, rotate, etc.) but it has effects I don’t get in my other apps: light leakage, bloom, advanced focusing capabilities, film treatment. And of course the usual: exposure control, grunge, color balance, brightness and contrast, tones, color, tint, sharpen, borders … the list goes on.
I find that opening up an image in Jazz stirs up my creativity; I start imagining new possibilities when I work with it. And that, my friends, is what good editing software should do for you.
– the Daily Grunge