Creating

Creating – Photos

I have as much fun making the image as I do bringing it to life in post-processing. Sometimes the change is subtle. But sometimes it’s quite dramatic, surprising even me.

There’s also those rare captures – the one in a million, that makes the whole day, sometimes the whole season, worth it.

I could post half my gallery but that’s not the point here is it? 🫣 I do have a high opinion of my imaging. I suppose that should be expected. I wouldn’t continue if it didn’t please me. Yes, I do realize I’m still an amateur, but I like most of what I call “my printables”. There are a few hanging around here, some at school, a few at a local coffee shop and a couple at the Boat & Bait shack at Lake Del Valle. I’m famous in my own mind. 😏

I don’t get out a lot to shoot lately, so I spend more time sifting through old images I haven’t processed yet for whatever reason. Sometimes they are a challenge to save – and that’s ok too – it takes up time, and I learn from every failure. Other times they are as good as any, but I probably skipped over because I already had eighty-three shots of that bird. 🤫 If I take the time to go back and look at what I chose instead, that too is a learning process. Did I choose the right one to save and work on? Why did this one turn out better than that one? It’s good reason to save metadata, exif, presets applied etc…, and be sure to save your edits in layers – .PSD for example. You can peel each layer away one at a time until you isolate the differences.

Creating – Books and Essays How-Tos, too

I’ve enjoyed writing since very young. The keyboard is my favorite invention. Now, not only can I ready what I’m writing, but so can everyone else. My handwriting has always been atrocious. I was that kid in Nun-school who got his knuckles cracked with a pointer if I didn’t use a near-perfect Palmer method of writing cursive. I never got close. I got cracked a lot.

I have written prose and poetry. I’ve published two books and I’m in the middle of cleaning up some fictions I wrote for fun here on my blog.

I have created several How Tos for photography techniques.

I don’t get the opportunity to do this now but I wrote several Tech Manuals for the Equipment I worked on. Companies like Intel and Abbot, incorporated my training and tech manuals into their document base. I took great pride in being exactly right in every detail, which made my bosses crazy waiting for me to re- verify the same things – just to be sure it’s consistent. I found coming up with descriptors for what I was explaining was impossible in the tech world. I had a database of purpose-taken photos for the manuals and flyers we made, and videos shown during customer-training classes.

Creating – Keeping the Fire Stoked:

I have recently taken up researching, producing and publishing Popi’s UnSpun News a Daily-Report. It helps to stay busy so this is a project I can always fall back on if nothing else presents itself. I usually know by mid-morning how my creative day will go. If nothing is sparking by then, I’ll call for a report to be researched – Perplexity loves that sort of task. Then I’ll set it up for a clean report with my observations. I make a point of insisting on verifiable sources…thus the “UnSpun” claim in the title. Yes, I do check the sources myself. It takes more time than I like, I honestly feel like the report is stale by the time I get it out. But, I’m determined to have something you and I can rely on for clean data to form our own opinions about.

So. That’s it. That’s what I do. It has little impact other that its claim to be factual, and I don’t chew the head off the first human to butt into my do-nothing days.

Popi sends…