The Banner: # 1 & 2

I love taking pictures (and people usually tell me I’m a good photographer), but I’m sort of a purist when it comes to photography, meaning that touching up a picture to make it perfect for me isn’t the same as actually taking the perfect picture, if you know what I mean.

Legendary photographers like Ansel Adams, Herb Ritts, or Robert Mapplethorpe (and I’m not comparing myself to those Gods mind you) didn’t have Photoshop to ‘fix’ their shots.  Sure, they played with light and filters and who knows how many other techniques, but once they took the shot, that was it.  Not much could be done during or after the film had been developed.  Nowadays, software like Photoshop allows you to edit and format a picture so much, the final product might have very little in common with the original shot.

On the other hand, I’ve always wanted to learn to use Photoshop, precisely for how it allows you to manipulate images, but I always felt intimidated by the sheer size of its options and settings.

Hence, taking a page from Andy Towle, who runs the website Towleroad, I’ve decided to occasionally refresh the look of my blog by uploading a new banner.  The banner will always display the blog’s name “BlogElution – The Blog Evolution,” but the background image will always change.

I’m planning to always use a picture I’ve taken myself and then have some fun with it in Photoshop.  Once the banner is ready, I’ll upload it and give a quick explanation of what I did to the original to obtain the final image.

I looked for the original image I had used when I created the first banner but since I cannot find it, I’m assuming it was just a sunset I had downloaded off the Internet:


For the second banner, given the season, I wanted something very summery and since I love taking pictures of flowers and I love sunflowers, what screams summer louder than sunflowers?

For my first foray into picture editing I didn’t want to go overboard, so I simply cropped the original image and squeezed it vertically.

This picture was taken with my first ever point and shoot digital camera, a Canon PowerShot S400 (that worked great till it finally died), on September 16, 2004 in Stratford, CT.  In fact, that was one of the sunflowers I had planted that year in our backyard, right in front of our lovely little porch.