Fun With Photoshop

Back in August, I worked the nightshift for three weeks covering for vacationing employees. That’s not nearly as bad as it sounds. Nightshift at my company is 3 on, 3 off and every other Saturday. In plain English that means I had a lot of time on my hands. I wish I could say that I used it constructively, attending to my house and my gardens. But of course I didn’t. Instead, I found lots of ways to waste time. Like playing with Photoshop.

Photoshop has been installed on my computer for quite a while now but I haven’t been using it. It’s so complex that I find it intimidating. Books about it either assume way more prior knowledge than I actually have or are so densely written as to be unreadable. Everyone tells me that the best way to learn the software is by using it. I decided to start with something simple like cropping.

I like this shot of cleome in my plot at Rutgers Gardens a lot. I like that it is a different angle from my usual pictures which tend to be carefully centered straight on shots. I like that it is slightly off-center: is the picture about the flower or the insect? But I also like pictures that don’t look exactly like what they are. And this one has the potential to be one of those if cropped.

I love this! It’s nearly impossible to tell what kind of flower this is. But the pattern of the petals is fantastic.

Not that there’s anything wrong with the other half of the photo. The bug has definite possibilities. With a little judicious cropping . . .

Voila! Another one of those pictures where it is difficult to distinguish the type of flower that the bug is investigating. Even better is that I got three great photos from one shot.