Theme Thursday: Green

And a Sort-of Tutorial

This photo was taken on my non-i-phone, actually a Nokia windows phone (which was the cheapest smart phone on my plan at the time when I bought it).  So I don't have Instagram--alack!--to pretty up my pictures.  But with a few tricks, I can make them at least hold a candle to my digital Canon.

Which I found the battery charger for, by the way!!!  (Yes, that merited three exclamation points.)  Now all I have to do is find a USB cord to download the photos from the camera to the computer.

So I snapped this photo of the two-year-old in Walgreens this morning.  Why yes, I do wait to the last minute, thank you for asking!  c;

I think it's important to know that even the best photographers take a ton of pictures in one session, because --let's face it--out of the twenty you're likely only to get three or four usable ones, and even less ones you consider good.  So it's something I have to remind myself of often.  Don't get discouraged it if it seems you have to take six pictures in a row before you're happy with one.

(This is actually a problem I've found only with digital cameras.  When I used a film camera, I was a lot less  self-conscious about picture quality and more free to be creative.  The reason is obvious--I couldn't look at the photo immediately afterward and self-evaluate.  So when I developed the roll later, I'd see all the pictures as a whole and feel instantly rewarded by the good ones, regardless of the not-so-good ones.

Also, I have a suspicion that old-fashioned film photography is actually easier than digital.  My pictures were much more likely to turn out nice on film, and I wonder if this doesn't have something to do with the lack of fancy apps that make the likelihood of misuse increase, for those of who are camera simpletons.)

Anyway, enough of that.  The point was that you're better off shooting a bunch of quick photos--especially with a moving subject like a two-year-old--than laboriously setting up a scene, taking  one photo, and hoping for the best.

Case in point:

So those are the two pictures I took.  I chose the second one because it's less blurry.

Then, using an app on my phone called Fhotoroom, I used the tilt shift function to make the background blurry.  The amount and shape of the area you want blurred is customize-able   You could also use the focus function on something like Photobucket, which does the same thing, although you can only make the blur area larger and smaller.

This is kind of the effect you would get with a nice f/1.4 lens that makes focusing in on close objects and leaving the non-focused object very out-of-focus.

Using the same program, I tried on different filters until I found one that I liked.  Fhotoroom has more filter options than Instacam (the Windows phone Instagram knock-off).  And so we have the finished photo above.

Then, just for kicks, I used Colorify, another app, on the pre-filtered photo to a make a nice, vibrant green-black-and-white.

You can see I missed a spot above his finger.  It's hard to get close without  unintentionally coloring what you want to keep gray-scale   Oh well.  On the phone you can't tell.

Mailed these photos from my phone to my e-mail account, opened and saved on the computer, and done.  So there you go.

Happy shooting, folks!  See you next Thursday for more Theme Thursday photos at Clan Donaldson!