Fun Photos

I have had several people wonder what kind of effects I used to get this photo:

 This is the original:

It was taken at a children's exhibit at the Getty Museum in L.A. There were a lot of mirrors attached to a wall at different angles. I took a picture of my reflection, just like I would in a normal mirror, but this was actually much harder. There was a lot of guess work in getting the camera positioned just right. Focusing was difficult too, partly due to low light, but mostly because I wasn't looking through the viewfinder and didn't know exactly where it was focusing.

This photo wasn't as sharp as I would like, so I touched it up a bit in the editing program I use, Digital Photo Professional. It's a fairly basic program that is easy to use and has the ability to edit RAW images. It does white balance, sharpens, and removes noise as well as the typical, saturation, hue, cropping, contrast, etc. It's a really great program that I'm happy with most of the time, the only problem is that it can't do any fun editing. No filters, overlays, or actions.

When I want to do some fun editing, I use this free program, Be Funky. It has so many neat free effects! The one I used on my picture was holgaart #4. The only down side is that with the free program, you can't save very large file sizes. For me, this is not a problem. Most of my pictures only go on the computer, I the ones I do print are often 4x6, which is about as big as you can print to get a decent quality. Of course, if you pay for it, you get more features and the ability to save larger files.

So that's how I did it. Pretty easy and really fun! Give it a try!