Rediscovering the Magic.

When I started taking photo's some 40 years ago I did it because it was fun. Over the years I have had ups and owns and times of great inspiration and huge frustrations. Running a business can be one of the hardest things to do and can make us lose the love of what we once enjoyed. Over the last year as I started and completed my 365 Day Project and now doing the Instagram 366 I am having a lot of fun once again. It is a great way to rediscover your passion.

When I started there was a magic in the darkroom, a sense of awe as the image came up under the red light in the developer. It was a seminal moment for many photographers in the film era. Along came digital and the darkroom faded in to the background, done by a few while most people shifted to the new technology. Photoshop did allow for some experimenting and plug-ins allowed for creativity, but it is slow and time consuming.

Enter the iPhone and other camera phones and a bevy of apps that allowed for quick images, processing and sharing of images. It is fun again to experiment with the different tools available to us and allow others to see and comment immediately. Today's images are part of me playing.

The image below was created in the backyard after a snowfall and captured with the iPhone, processed with Snapseed, framed with PhotoForge2 and posted using Instagram. The above image was fun and a result of experimentation. I have a number of apps and wanted to try this one called Photo Booth which is one of many of these apps that are suppose to mimic the old style mall Photobooth's. It was late and I pointed my iPad at myself for an Auto Portrait. I started to play with the functions and was looking at the "Squeeze" lens and how funny it made me look. After taking the image I brought the file in to Snapseed on the iPad and then used the Drama 2 filter and added the frame. So if you like you can call me "Mega Mind" from now on.