Wow, what a week!

I didn't do any photography this week, not even any post-processing on the computer. But it was fast and furious and I am exhausted with working at learning! I know I mention this quite often. But it seems that learning is at least two-thirds of my workload each week.

The new programs like Adobe's Lightroom (a type of program that didn't even exist just a couple years ago) can do amazing things but also can take amazing time to learn. Especially to get past all wonderful words about the glorious things they can do to find the words that explain how to do all these glorious things quickly and effectively.

That is the hardest part ... finding where someone has created actual instructions on the details of how to accomplish the marvelous end result, and without those frustrating skipped steps. What do I mean by "skipped steps"? The steps that "everybody" knows that you should do at this point ... and so do not write down or mention.

For an example that was (in it's day) legendary, I'll go to Photoshop ... about version 3 or 4. The program was still fairly new, and as most professional photographers still shot film, not many people other than graphic designers had used the program. I think they were the Photoshop Cognoscenti of the time, they just ... knew ... how it worked. Then we professional photographers started shooting in digital capture, and really needed to work our files in Photoshop.

We were not the Cognoscenti, the Initiated Ones. And at the time, there were relatively few books on doing anything in Photoshop. So we all went to the manual, to find how to do anything, and (near universally) shared this first experience. Taking manual in hand: "First I do this ... uh-huh ... now this ... right ... now ... oh wow, that is cool ... now the next step is ... WAIT! They say "do this" but all my options are grayed-out, and ... hey! ... they don't show the "crawly ants" around the image window anymore. My Photoshop won't allow me to do ANYTHING and ... how do you get rid of the crawly ants?"

As it turned out, after making a "selection" (which was shown by the "crawly ants" around the image) you needed to click outside the image but inside the image window, on the "canvas", as it was called, before Photoshop would recognize you wanted to move on, say, to do something with that selection. And nowhere in the Adobe manual nor in most other books on Photoshop in print at the time was that step ever mentioned.

That one little skipped step stopped hundreds of photographers for days each until they could find someone who knew enough to tell them what the problem was. I even managed to "click" in the appropriate area once (entirely accidentally), and didn't realize what it was I'd done ... so I couldn't replicate the feat. But finally I found someone who, in a very irritated voice at being asked about such a trivial and obvious matter ... said "You click on the canvas, dummy! How else is the program supposed to know you are done making your selection?"

Um, -- I didn't know Photoshop needed to know anything about what I was thinking ... silly me! Over the years, I've found that at times I've been not so sweet myself at helping others with the trivial or obvious, but as I catch myself at it, I have been working hard at being gentle and helpful. There are still so many things I don't find trivial or obvious!

I am so appreciative of the complete instructions, the patient tutor, the well-written details. I am working hard at learning to be as complete, patient, and well-written as I want of those around me.

Do you LOVE what you do?

I had one of those thrilling moments yesterday, where I looked at an image I'd made last year and saw something new in it ... and so, I went back into Lightroom and played with it, using the "Virtual Copy" feature of LR, where I didn't alter the original. When I was done, and looked at the image I'd re-created, I realized I had also solved the puzzle of what to do with another image from the same shoot that I'd always known I wasn't finished with yet ... somehow.


It made for a joyful evening for me, and the reception of the few who've seen them, including the young woman who was the subject in both, are a delight for me also.

The first image, the one you see as a closeup of her face, was originally a vertical of her leaning against a pillar, and you still see part of her hand in this image. But I most loved the soft curving line of her jaw, and the mouth and lips. By the time I'd cropped in to the parts that seemed most beautiful for me, I knew I wanted to emphasis the lips even more, and so took the image to b/w except for carefully altering the color and increasing the saturation of the lips. I look at it now like a new image, and ... I love it.


The other, in the alleyway, I've loved for the angles and the thrust of her torso and head to the camera. With a bit of the same ideas (though applied very differently here) I desaturated the left side, bottom right, and top right, while also darkening them and lowering the contrast within those areas, and then modified the color of the lips and increased the saturation of that red. Now that image is what somehow it always needed to be in my mind.

The joys of creation anew!