Picture perfect

Like most photographers these days, I cheat. I'm not saying all photographers cheat and if you can take excellent, perfectly composed photos, then good for you. However, if you give even those photographers access to a photo manipulation program, they'll soon find ways to mess around with their perfect pictures to make it even better.

I've been thinking for awhile that I needed a new picture of the top of the blog, but I haven't taken one recently that I really loved. And then, by a bit of pure flukery I glance out the window lunch time earlier the week and saw just an absolutely perfect photo. I ran, grabbed my camera and snapped a bunch of pictures.

So what's the problem? The problem is I loaded the picture into Aperture, which is Apple's photo program. Some people like Lightroom, but Aperture suits me just fine. It does the trick without me having to get into the deeply complicated overkill that is Photoshop.

Anyway, I've been playing with it for a couple of hours now. And it's hard to stop.

So let's take the original image, which I like. And feel free to click on it to get a larger version of the picture.



I like the picture a lot, but I knew there was some tweaking that needed to be done. So you start running Aperture and playing. And next think you know you're messing with the saturation levels and get something like this.



Or there's the shadows function



I kind of like the black and white version of the picture, although you do loose the nice colours of the sunset. But the arctic really is something that looks good in stark colours.



And that's all before I start cropping, which I will end up doing. Cropping actually improves the photo quite a bit, I think. And then I have to be tempted to mess with the colour balance again.



So yeah, this is going to be the new image on the top of my blog. If I can ever stop messing with it enough to actually put it up. Because right now, I just can't stop picking at it.

Last Five
1. Long division - Death Cab For Cutie
2. Too many - Sloan
3. Freedom for the stallion - Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint (Clare, it occurs to me you would really like this CD. You should wreck your credit limit a bit and get it).
4. Future language of slaves - Hawksley Workman
5. Newfoundland weather - Colleen Power* (I absolutely love this song and will argue it is one of the best songs written by a Newfoundlander in the past 10 years).