Do The Leafdance, Baby!

Were you "leafdancing" with me on my last post? You probably thought it was all very complicated to achieve but actually many of those shots could be taken quite easily on a point and shoot camera (were, in fact,  taken on a point and shoot camera, albeit a Lumix) and only needed the kind of manipulation which can be done with a simple photofix program like Windows Photo Gallery that was supplied with Vista, or Windows Live Photo Gallery which is freely available for XP, Vista and Windows 7. Or, as they say on TV, other programs are available!

First of all take yourself and your camera to an autumn woodland - or anywhere with some colourful scenery.....

.....on a dull day your pictures will come out looking like this - dull! And if you try to photograph the leaves in close-up they'll probably be dull and blurred; the slow shutter speed has not been fast enough to stop the movement of the leaves or to eliminate camera-shake.....

Time to try something different. How about, if rather than trying to hold the camera still in a vice-like grip, you waggle it about? Round and round, side to side, up and down, backwards and forwards. It's OK, no one's watching - experiment! These are the kind of tricks we had to employ to try to get something unusual from 35mm cameras in pre-digital days. Occasionally we got something interesting, mostly we wasted lots of film. But, hey, with digital you can keep shooting till the battery runs out!

Mmmm, well, interesting. The movement of the camera has given lots of intriguing blurred effects - impressionistic, dreamy. But it's also muddied all the colours and seems to have thoroughly disorientated the light-metering system. Lets see if we can rescue something with a bit of computer tinkering....

                                                                           .....a bit more contrast might help.

                                                                                 .....and more colour saturation.

That's quite nice but for some reason the colours don't look very autumnal. Hang on, we can change the colour temperature, warm it up, more reds and browns....

                                                                                                         ....getting there!

I'd probably crop the image a bit. Like this.

Of course you can go completely crazy if you like....

                                                                                No, probably not a good idea!

But I could have made a fortune designing album covers for Jimi Hendrix!

Take care.