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January 5: Embracing Imperfection (Photography Challenge)

here is my take... The original photo was overlighted and very yellow

 
Blurry, grainy, badly lit, and with some questionable composition. Some of that stuff I could fix with Pictapgo, but I'm living with the rest (like all of the junk I caught in the background, eyeroll) because honestly, every picture I have of my grandmother is precious.

 
My photos are super grainy. They were watching a show and it was a little "scary" to them so they were holding onto each other and I wanted to get a picture of it without them noticing. So no flash.
 
I decided to embrace the imperfection of me butting in one of the shots :) Great challenge though to help us be a bit forgiving about the quality of shots and focus more on the reality of it all. Thanks Kim.
 
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These photos are really too dark b/c they are 1. at night 2. too much contrast and 3. taken with a phone. But I manipulated them enough to love how they turned out.

 
Here I am... :)


I just embraced imperfection. The words are on the right side layout (also in my gallery), but the pictures still depict the goofiness of the kids wanting family piles and silly faces. grainy, horrible angles, lighting, and all. :D :heartslub
 
Here is my imperfect photo. It is a very good example for "don't do that photography" but also it's awesome.
On the left (before I cropped) there was a half size man with pink shirt, on the back there was another person with camera and focus on her. my little one is almost inside the frame. I cropped it and to make it black & white helped to focus
to my son. I think it's done!
beside all imperfection there is something lovely! because this photo taken by my 3 years old little son with selfie stick! And he became a pro!!



IMG_8575.jpg
 
I took that photo with my smartphone, it was dark and really sharpen... I've decided to play with light and to turn it in a kind of sepia tone to match the colors of the page

12509334_10207408842772582_5132967327673860453_n.jpg

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This photo was very overexposed but still a cute interaction between the boys. I made it black and white and added a wrinkled paper texture over the top of it before I used it in the layout.
 
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Last Concert
My original looked like this:
2015-05-06-incoming-17018.jpg

My daughter wanted a picture with her best friend after their last choir concert and the indoor lighting is terrible as well as the backdrop. I cropped the photo, separated them from the background and used a pixelate filter called color halftone on the background portion. I also decreased the shadows and brought up the exposure a bit.
 
KimJ, thank you SO much for this challenge! Here's my submission:



I think the only way to illustrate just how BAD these three images were/are is to show you what they looked like, SOOC (straight out of camera):

MOC-05-SOOC.jpg


The center image was horribly underexposed, since I thought I had my camera in Aperture-priority mode and it was really in manual. Thankfully, I was shooting in RAW, so I was able to use Lightroom to bring up the exposure by 3 stops and run a LR preset and Photoshop Nik action to reduce the noise.

The two outside images, in addition to being underexposed, had really busy backgrounds, filled with competing colors and lines. (I couldn't take her outside to shoot like I wanted to, since the weather was awful.) And the image on the left was actually blurry because I couldn't get my shutter speed up high enough to freeze her twist.

I almost deleted them. I'm so glad I didn't! Thanks to this challenge, I took a closer look and got creative. To improve the two outside images, I used masking and gradient maps to turn everything except my niece to black-and-white. Then those wispy pieces of her dress where the golden wood of the floor shows through, I used masks and a desaturation layer to remove all the color, and a mask on a solid color layer in blue, set to color blending mode, to paint back in the blue. I don't know if that made a bit of sense ... here's a photo to illustrate:

skirt-fix.jpg


The photos still aren't perfect, but they're SO much better than they were!
 
Here's mine - I was doing a birthday photoshoot of a very tired little subject, and when we changed her into the outfit for her daddy's favorite football club, she decided she had had enough and the smiles disappeared. Because she was very upset and I was shooting without flash, the motion of her arms waving also blurred the picture. Thankfully, I was able to sing her to sleep and just finished her birthday photoshoot with pictures of her sleeping peacefully, but I caught a few of a very unhappy birthday girl - not perfect at all, but still a captured memory:
 
Mine were super bad pics - taken at night ...under yellow light bulbs...hank God for bnw! i dont think i still love them too much...but i love the story too much to let the photos go!:)

 
Here's mine:


Here is the original image:


Taken with my iPhone. This picture is underexposed, has shadows on my daughter's face, it's noise and the background is ugly and distracting. I edited it in LR - removed the noise, changed the exposure, added contrast and sharpening. I am much happier with the edited version.
 
My layout includes two blurry photos that my son took with his new camera - not sure if it is the camera, or the photographer! I thought I would leave them blurry.
 


I took this photo early on when I was still learning photography and editing and edited it with horrible neon grass. I also accidentally deleted the raw file, so this is my attempt to bring the photo more in line with my current editing style, working from a wonky jpeg.
 
I did not change a thing, but decided to focus on the truth of where you look.....need to remember this!!!!
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