Photography and Editing

As I'm sure most of you can tell, I love to take pictures.  I am lucky enough to have a Pentax K10D.  It is not the most popular of the cameras but as it is hard to find at just any store.  My first camera was a Pentax K1000 back in 1980.  I purchased it from Kmart for around $200.   Of course we didn't have a lot of money, so film and development were expensive and so the dream of becoming a career photographer kinda died way back when.  I love digital technology.  I can take a thousand pictures, delete or keep what I want.  Manipulate them to my desire and not spend a dime.  Of course if I want them printed I have to have them "developed" so to speak.  Or I can print them myself and that's where the cost is.   No big deal.  Of course digital cameras cost a whole lot more these days and I did spend quite a bit on my camera.  I also have a zoom lens that I got for Christmas that wasn't cheap either.

At my age, I do not have any delusions of becoming a professional photographer.  But I do think I take a fairly decent picture.  I think my flower pictures are probably my best and I also love playing with the photo editing software.  I don't have PhotoShop as it is way to expensive.  In fact everything I use can be downloaded free from the web.  I generally use Picsasa3 for basic things like cropping and some light fixing.  But for "fancier" edits I used a variety of programs, my favorite is PhotoScape, but I also use Gimp, PhotoFilter, and Paint.NET.

The following photograph was all edited using PhotoScape:

 The original photograph

After cropping

using "edging" and "sharpening"

Sepia and antiquing

Black and White with deepening