The Logo I Made in Powerpoint

I decided to use a picture of my niece and to write "Capturing the moments that matter most to you" for my logo.

I played around a lot with some of my nature shots and ideas like "Nature: The Beauty in Your Backyard" or "Amazing Sights Outside". I thought about attaching a couple different pictures and writing something to the effect of "Inspiring", "Beautiful", "Enchanting", and so on.

In the end I decided on this logo because for me it explains what I tend to take pictures of. I focus most of my photography on people like my family or sights I have seen on vacations; moments that matter the most to me at the time I am taking the photo. While I love pictures that portray different objects around the house from interesting angles and what not, I don't ever find myself taking these types of photos.

Cropping and Lighting to Enhance Photographs

Here is the original photgraph I took of the flower in my backyard. I really liked this flower and wanted to use it on my blog. However, when looking at this photo I feel as though there are too many items in it. So I decided to crop this one down.

I really wanted to keep the flower noticably in the lower right hand corner so I didn't want to bring the left side in very much. Also, I thought it would look better if I could cut out as much of the siding on my house as possible. I even cut away some of the bottom and right hand side to bring the flower down a little bit lower into the corner. This is what I came up with:

I was happy with the cropping but I felt as though the photo had a little too much light in it. It sort of looks hazy to me. I used the levels tool in CS4 and chose "darken midtones". It gave the green a little more saturation and took away some of the white haze.

This next photo is the original shot of the hummingbird. I love this photo, but there are a few items I really wanted to change in it. The first being to cut away all of the extra space at the bottom of the photo. I also felt like this photo needed to be darkened up a bit to really emphasize the hummingbird.

This is the photo after cropping away the extraneous space at the bottom. I thought it looked really neat to have the heighth of the picture the same as the birdfeeder. It helps illustrate just how small the hummingbird is in comparison. Then, I darkened the trees in the background using the "add contrast" level in CS4. Which helped to make the hummingbird stand out more. I wish there wasn't such a glare on the bird itself which is quite evident in the first shot as well. But as I played around with the different levels, brightness and contrast, and the hues nothing would ever really happen to the bird that I liked. It was clearly a very sunny day in South Carolina!

Cropping as a Tool

Here is the original shot of the wasp. You can see that the wasp is more centered in this photograph. There is also a blur on the left hand side which I wanted to get rid of along with the extra material part of the chair along the bottom.

I took this photo in South Carolina. This one is the cropped version. I chose to crop this so that one can notice a distinct rule of three. You have the metal design, the wasp, and the background. I know you aren't supposed to center anything, but because the wasp is the focus I thought the picture looked best when the entire design was centered. The wasp being off in the left side makes this photo appealing to me.