This is an original photo which I took this past summer at my trailer in Peterborough, near Kawartha Lake. It was my last visit at the trailer for the year as it was getting too cold to stay there overnight. Photo manipulation is something that I've wanted to do for a long time but I was always afraid of messing up the quality of the picture. As you can see at the original photo that I took, some might say that it has been enhanced in some way or form, but actually it is the original picture. It might have been the time of day, the angle of the sun or where I was at that point in time, but to me, this picture was already perfect. I feel as if this picture could be a postcard. To be honest, I wasn't even sure what shutter speed, ISO or aperture setting that I was using. I will admit that this photo was taken by luck :).
I was quite hesitant to manipulate this picture. I was going to choose a regular Black and White manipulation, but I thought that would change the tone of the photo to a more 'gloomy' emotion. I thought it was appropriate to do a Focal Black and White effect to the picture. I think this effect was appropriate because to me it symbolized the end of the summer, almost as if the sun was fading. I didn't want to add another effect to it just because I don't like overdoing things. Most manipulated photos these days have the tendency to overdo itself and I think that itself takes away a lot from the photo. To explain what I mean, I edited the photo once again to show what I mean by disrupting the quality of the photo. I chose the effects Soften, Vignette and HDR-ish. It is quite obvious that the photo is much better than previous edit. However, in my humble opinion, it is still not as good as the original photo.
I think programs like Picasa is a very useful program to enhance or manipulate photos for 'newbies' like myself. It's not as complicated Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator. It enables photographers to embrace photo editing without the fear of taking the quality from the photo. I think that editing landscape photography is much easier than doing let's say, portraits or photo shoots. The reason being there would be many subtle changes to colour and contrast, while doing some skin retouching or removable of blemishes or flaws, while maintaining the skin texture.
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