Experimenting again...

New York, a photo by erickpineda527 on Flickr.

I've always loved photography and have had a camera in my hand as early as 10-years-old. Back then it was my mother's 35mm Kodak camera. It was nothing fancy.

I recently went through some old photos from a trip to Italy back in 2002 (?) thinking I would have these scanned and saved digitally. Looking through the prints I realize now how much more experience I needed behind a lens. While they look great for keepsakes they were definitely needing some love. Poor saturations, light leaks, bad exposures. Oy.

I remember the excitement of coming home from that trip to Italy wanting to see what we shot. It looked great then. Not so great now. I have definitely gotten better at my compositions and am learning to embrace more digital techniques to enhance the overall effect. A lot of our images felt flat and lacking depth.

Enter Tilt Shift Focus. While a dedicated lens is very expensive, a photographer can somewhat capture this effect using similar techniques digitally. After playing with it a little I'm pretty excited to comb through the thousands upon thousands of photographs from all over the world and see what are good candidates for this technique. Woot!