Welcome to My Morning

Here I am on a sunny Sunday morning listening to one of my favourite driving home artists, John Denver, and actually enjoying being at home for once.  This past month has been a blur of travel – so much so that my luggage is still sitting patiently in my living room awaiting the next trip (BC it looks like).  It also means I haven’t even had time to download any of the many photos on either camera.  That will have to wait until this afternoon.  I’ll let you know here if there’s any treasures to be found on my memory cards…

Yesterday I finally spent some time on my new Ginger Snaps Facebook page, uploading some favourite snaps that will hopefully serve as a small “snapshot” or portfolio of the pictures I’ve taken and the places I’ve been.  Since posting these shots I’ve been asked by a few people how I get my shots so “saturated.”  (Please see the shot above, for example, taken in the Distillery District here in Toronto.)  I’m happy to oblige.  I am rarely pleased with the colour of my photos straight out of the camera.  For some reason, I crave rich colours.  So after a small stop over in Photoshop for cropping and boosting contrast, I upload each shot to a fabulous on-line editing website called Picnik.  There you will find lots of easy tools that can help you straighten, crop, boost the colour of and even frame and sign your snaps.  I love Picnik as they have simplified the editing process so I can spend more time out taking shots than fiddling with them at my desk.  Tools such as “Ortonish” and “Cross Processing” (my favourites) short cut a bajillion persnickety Photoshop steps for the time-pressed photographer.  There is a free version with useful tools and a premiere edition that costs roughly $30 per annum (annum is my word of the day…sounds smarter than year…).  I have not regretted investing in the premiere edition and cannot recommend Picnik enough.  Give them a try the next time you have snaps ready for editing.

My next post will arrive shortly.  Just so you don’t think I’m just about super-saturated colour, I want to share with you one of my first digital snaps ever, and one of my favourite black and whites.  Stay tuned…