Photo Bliss

Originally uploaded by Zanalee
Hipstamatic filters
Vignetting
Erosion
Curving
Line textures
Backlighting

These are a few of my favorite things! This week, I finally got up the guts to inquire of one of my favorite photographers on flickr how she managed to develop such incredibly unique looking photographs. If you're into old, worn, rubber stamped looking images that call to mind a fond but forgotten time and evoke a haunting mood of nostalgia, her stuff is genius. For over a year I looked at her tags, looked closely at her images and could not figure out how she managed to produced this wonderfully ancient, falling apart, cool, retro 70s look. I thought maybe she was shooting film but I knew enough about photography to understand it couldn't be that. I was stumped.

I won't be as kind as she was and reveal what she told me here but plenty of photographers can name a hundred kinds of photo editing software with filters like this that will turn your images back a hundred years! Can you believe that? Now with all this technology, all these quasi android creations we have created, now we want to travel back in time again! I love it.

This photo editing software has really changed the way I look at photography. It's so easy to use and has taught me more than a lot of more sophisticated expensive programs I've looked at and even own. This one really encourages you to play around and experiment and learn a lot about some of the ways pictures were developed very early on. *Sigh* This is the kind of thing I could do literally for hours. Unfortunately though, this software is not compatible with Mac so I've been bringing the images I want to work on to edit on my office PC. I don't want to talk about it.