What If?

This week I have been having a lot of fun trying out a few different photography things. Some, like star trails, are remaining elusive. Others, like taking an impressionistic image with my smart phone, have been more successful. So as I was thinking about what I wanted to share in today's blog I thought I would find an image that I liked and then see what I could do with it using the iColorama app. Most of the time when I open an image in this app I have absolutely no idea what I want to do with it. So I spend a good bit of time wondering "what if" and trying a lot of different effects. Today especially was an example of my spending over an hour of trying this and that. My starting image of one of my fading dahlias was one, like many of the ones I take with my iPhone, that I had no idea what I would ever do with. I just thought the way it was fading and drying up was interesting. While working with it in the app my direction tended to follow the path of making it look a bit more like I had drawn or painted it. I also enhanced the colors a bit to bring out the tones in the crispy petals. And finally I mirrored it so the flower would face in a different direction. But I was still not totally satisfied. I wondered how things would look if I the iColorama image with the original one. I think you can layer in iColorama, too, but I am not as familiar with doing that in that app, and when I get into really working with an image, I prefer to have a screen larger than my iPad's so I can more easily work with the finer details of an image. So I decided to bring both the original and the one created in iColorama as layers into my usual post processing software. I brought down the opacity just a bit on the latter one to allow some of the original come through. I then merged the two layers and edited the merged file by first getting rid of the annoying little white circle in the upper left. Next I enhanced the contrast and added sunshine and antique filters, and finished it off with just a bit of a vignette. Every step of the way with this creation was an exercise in "what if." It's not too bad an approach to most things in life actually. It can help keep us out of trouble as well as also to take us to new experiences and discoveries. I am realizing that I am more and more thinking and acting as a result of living a "what if" life. It's actually a lot of fun and I highly recommend it.