All These Places Have Their Moments... (or: a photo editing exercise)

So since we’ll be doing lots of editing and such as part of the classes, we were instructed to go ahead and download specific software and do a few projects to practice before we leave on the big adventure.

Here are my first efforts (at least the first in several years) at photo editing. Our practice assignment was basically to take a picture with a digital camera, upload it to the computer and just play!

These photos were taken at ColdWater Books in Tuscumbia, Alabama. I grew up in Tuscumbia and recently spent a few weeks there hanging out with my family. I spent several nights at the ball park watching my nephews play baseball, went to my niece’s 3rd grade honors program, and spent many hours drinking coffee and writing at ColdWater Books.

Although ColdWater opened the year I graduated from high school and, therefore, the bookstore/coffee shop and I only existed in this town together for a short time, it has become one of my favorite places to visit in Tuscumbia when I’m there. It doesn’t hurt that the coffee is fantastic. 

Here's my first shot. I was instructed to simply "take a photo." 


Then, the instructions said to crop the photo to make something in the photo the focus. 


And so, I did.

Next, I was to use any two of the editing tools to play around with the picture and see what happens. 


First, I decided to use the saturation tool to make the photo black and white. Here ya go:

For the second effect, I used the saturation tool to brighten the colors and then I used the posterize tool for a different look. And here's that one:

So that's all I was supposed to do for this assignment... But once I started playing with photo editing, I didn't really want to stop. I had taken another picture at the coffee shop that day, which I really liked, and I decided to see if I could enhance it a little. Here's the original:

And here's my enhanced version:

Tada!! I lowered the brightness and heightened the contrast. And now I love this picture even more. In fact, it is currently my desktop background. 


I really enjoyed playing with the editing tools and I'm certainly looking forward to learning all that I can about taking and editing great digital photos.