Spent all weekend getting funky

I was inspired to try out some things with Photoshop this weekend while my husband was busy producing music in the basement. To the dulcet tones of his bass speaker, I decided that it was a good time to play with some of my photos.

It has to be said that I've always been somewhat resistent to messing with my photos much. I take a lot of time to compose my shots so that they don't need to be post-produced. However, I am realizing that post-production definitely has its place when done correctly. I'm pretty happy with my efforts and of course have to share them with you here!

I tried out a Lomo effect on this picture. Lomography has characteristics including high color saturation and vignettes. Next up was this picture of the Old Mission Santa Barbara. My brother lives up in Santa Barbara which is a wonderfully peaceful town and I visited on a quiet weekday when there weren't too many visitors. Just walking around the mission, there is such history there that I decided to add some age to this photograph.
Finally, I've thousands of wedding photographs that I've been meaning to organize from the wedding shoots I've done over the last few years. This is one of my favorite photographs. I love capturing the quiet moments. In this case, the bride was waiting for her family to gather for formal shots and was looking at her chuppah, which was covered in the most beautiful flower garlands. I added a little warmth and soft lighting to the natural dusk lighting that the original photo was taken in. Now I've had a chance to learn some new things about Photoshop, I'm really looking forward to going through my photos and finding new pictures to tweak. I'd love to hear opinions on what you are seeing here!

The beginnings of digital art

As my name, Organic Stills, suggests - I am proud of my unedited photography. My personal take on photography is that the image that appears once the picture has been developed (whether 35mm or digital) is the moment captured in time. Playing with it in photoshop is a different art entirely...a very clever one that has amazing results mind you,

but isn't photography in it's most raw (organic) sense.

Having admired the digital art for a while, I decided to open up Photoshop and try my hand at creating something. I'm not much use with a brush and canvas in the physical sense so perhaps I'll do better digitally. Using my photography as a basis, I came up with a couple of digital art pieces last night which I hope to sell as ACEOs (Art Cards Editions And Originals). As an ACEO has to be 2.5"x3.5", I will be mounting them onto some playing cards I've got, which are that exact size. It'll also help me to number the prints, one print per suit, 13 editions of each card.

This flower picture received a watercolor filter, followed by color spot treatment.

These other pictures were originally photographs of handcarved wood doors, taken in Singapore. I inverted the colors and adjusted the color curves to create this effect.