Playing with Pictures

Photoshop…sugar-coated deception or sweet creative reality?

Early Morning River Mist © Lisa Shambrook

I’ve been playing with photographs for many years. I got my first Kodak Instamatic camera when I was twelve, and used up my first whole roll of film taking photos of our local neighbourhood cats and squirrels in the local park! I’ve never had an expensive camera. I went from a standard 35mm to ‘borrowing’ my daughter’s Fugi Finepix S5700.

I love that mobile phones now come with a camera which was a defining moment in my life as was discovering Photoshop!

It’s been said that using Photoshop is cheating, but I prefer to believe it enhances and helps, rather than cheats! If you’re lucky you can take a stunning shot and there it is…but more often than not, my efforts need a bit of tweaking and editing.

I took this shot early on a cold November morning, and the resulting photograph was a little more saturated, but a slight tweak with Photoshop levels took it right back to the image my eyes had seen that morning.

Photoshop can capture the image you originally saw. It can create art and it can be fun!

I recently saw several examples of amazingly well edited photography which looked stunning…

These beautiful photographs taken by a Russian mother Elena Shumilova of her children and animals amid Winter magic… and here’s a link to her stunning work on Flickr…

And wonderfully surreal photographs by a father, Dave Engledow, the World’s Best of his day-to-day life with his baby daughter…

And amazing photo manipulator Erik Johansson, check out his mind boggling work here, here and on his website.

You can find more of my photography at Lisa Shambrook The Last Krystallos on Flickr…

And if you’d like to see more fun and fabulous photography, take a look at the photos on The Shutterworks Photoblog… we welcome you to our photo fun!