This is primarily a travel blog in which I write about traveling in our motorhome. Our travels have

Nacogdoches, TX, United States
I began this blog as a vehicle for reporting on a 47-day trip made by my wife and me in our motorhome down to the Yucatan Peninsula and back. I continued writing about our post-Yucatan travels and gradually began including non-travel related topics. I often rant about things that piss me off, such as gun violence, fracking, healthcare, education, and anything else that pushes my button. I have a photography gallery on my Smugmug site (http://rbmartiniv.smugmug.com).

Friday, March 30, 2012

Photos in Chronological Order

I've added some more photos and rearranged the photo pages so that they are now in the order in which we visited theses areas. I didn't bother adding the dates as they can be found in the blog pages. I am still going through the 11,000 or so photos trying to pick out the better or the more illustrative ones of our experiences. Every time I go through them it seems that I see something for the first time. I am also attempting to improve some with minor light and color editing and also with different crops. I can't do too many at one sitting as I begin to tire and my eyes begin to blur. I find that I get much better results with a photo by working for shorter time periods. I don't use Photoshop as I would never spend enough time on it to learn how to use it. I would rather be lazy and think of serious editing with Photoshop or similar applications as "cheating". However, if I ever do learn to use such an app I will no longer think of it as cheating. Then it will just be working smart with another available tool! Right now I simply (and that is the KEY word) use Apple's iPhoto. I try to save all of my originals so that as my editing abilities do improve I can go back to the original and work on it again. You may notice on some of my more "artsy" photos that I like to play with color. I tend to over-saturate bright colors on purpose so that they seem to POP out at the viewer. These photos are not meant to look exactly as the original subject looked to the naked eye. Not everyone likes to see photos edited in this manner. But you have to remember, unless the photographer has been asked to reproduce a scene in a particular manner, the photographer is creating an image in the manner or style that he/she prefers. Afterall, We look at our own photos more than anyone else does! If you do like any of the photos you see on these pages then you may enjoy visiting my photo gallery pages on Smugmug (http://rbmartiniv.smugmug.com).

2 comments :

Croft said...

Saving a copy of the original photo in it's native format will enable you to do manipulation later on. I have Photoshop but save it for photos that I have printed for display. Blog photos get a very simple improvement from Picasa.

11,000 photos. Wow! Separate them into a file called "really good" and another called "everything else" and go from there. Be brutal with the delete button. Good luck, says the guy with about 700 GB of photos.

Robert & Carol Ann Martin said...

Thanks, Croft. I'm doing something similar in separating photos. Just calling the folders something else. I'm also downsizing the photos to approximately 1 MB before I upload them as original sizes are up to 15 MB.