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I haven't shot with Hipstamatic for a long time. Last week, we reconnected and I found to my delight that Hipsta had stored a whole lot of images which until now had been lost. Included in these images were the very first Hipstamatic shots I took - very simple images that set me on the pathway to years of fun and satisfaction with abstract photography.
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Microsoft's Office Lens is an app that was designed as a scanner: you would use it to take pictures of documents, business cards and presentations cast onto a screen. The app detects the edges of the slide/document/card, analyses the tonality of the image and then trims and enhances it, producing a neat, squared image. It's very good at that. I decided to shoot Berlin with Office Lens - let it do its thing, and see what happens. I really like what it does with buildings shot from street level. I tried out a mirrorless Sony camera a few weeks back. Really liked it. These are some shots I took, many taken at the extreme end of the 20-200mm zoom lens.  Sometimes, I'm not sure whether a shot is "good" or not, but I really like it all the same. I've learned that there's not a lot of point in trying to shoot images that you think someone else might regard as "good" anyway. I shoot to please myself and "good" to me might simply mean that I did a more pleasing job than I might have done 6 months ago. I took this yesterday at a football match. I thought the warm late afternoon light looked appealing and there was an opportunity to shoot people moving randomly, which I like doing. I like the arrangement of the figures and there's a certain balance in the composition (cropping very helpful here) which makes me like this picture. It's an iPhone shot, cropped and processed in Snapseed. I also ran it through Oggl, where I was able to enhance the warmth in a pleasing way. The original shot is below.   Every now and again, you hit on an editing formula that just works, from a personal satisfaction point of view. I got a huge kick out of this edit. I used Snapseed, Superimpose and DistressedFX on theis edit and then ran it through Oggl, which actually wasn't really essential. The key though, was to use Color Thief to adjust the tones to my liking. That technique has been something of a revelation, in that it will allow me to develop a more consistent result colourwise, if I so choose.
This image was featured online within 24 hours of its release! Cool. 
When I was in Brisbane, I joined the Saturday night ghost tour at Toowong cemetery. Took my phone and shot what I could. With basically only torchlight available, the results were predictably rough, but I thought I might be able to make something of them in post processing. Really happy with the results tonight. I used Photoshop Express, then Glaze and finally Mextures. I think I'm starting to get a handle on Mextures finally. On my way home across the continent last week, I stopped off at the Balladonia roadhouse for breakfast. There's a big chunk of Skylab in the roadhouse museum! I remember when it fell out of orbit in 1979, bringing ephemeral fame to Balladonia. I photographed every inch of it, plus the press clippings on the wall. I am such a nerd. This is what I did with them. Seven different composite images in all, with no particular stand-out. This one is number three. I have used Snapseed and Superimpose for the edit. 
I'm home from my trip around Australia. I drove nearly 27,000km over a three-and-a-half month period and took something like 15,000 photos. I'm sure about the kilometres but not the photos. I don't really want to know how many pictures I have to review before I can start thinking about getting a photobook together. On the one hand, I have plenty of time to do this. On the other, I need to get it done before the whole project goes stale. Let's see how I go. This image is a Lightroom edit of a shot taken on the very first day, somewhere out of Goomalling in Western Australia. The key elements of the edit are some sharpening and contrast adjustments to the tree line and the lines in the field and some play with the exposure in the central region. It's a nice clean image to start with. 
Canon 7D
 I don't often set out to produce a wildly colourful abstract, but they so frequently turn out that way. I started with this picture, shot with iPhone, of spent poppy flowers in a display cabinet in a museum in Tasmania.  Then, I cropped it in Snapseed and increased the ambience slightly. I also played with the 'details' feature a little. I wanted to give it a more graphical feel.  Then, I opened image 3 in iColorama, aiming to further develop the graphic feel. I'm feeling that this image wants to be less a photo of poppies and more a picture of them. I put the image through 'Flow' (option 1) in the Effects menu. Then, from the Tone menu, I chose one of the tint options - 36/54. I love this feature of iColorama.  Now, I'm getting somewhere, as I have a nice 'pop art' feel happening. Next, I open the image in Decim8 and try random combinations of effects. Sometimes this process just doesn't work and sometimes it does. I usually save several different versions, once I've found a combination of effects that work for me. I chose to proceed with the one below.  Now, I have introduced some pleasing new elements to the image, but it is clearly unbalanced now. So, it is back to Snapseed for another crop. Then, I take the cropped image into Glaze and process it using what I refer to as the 'Sunset 2' option.  This doesn't represent an improvement, but that's not what this version is for. Now, I use this image as the background and image 5 as the foreground in a composite created with Superimpose. I've used multiply mode.  The final edit is done in Snapseed - I've had a look at what 'Auto Correct' does to the image, and reduced the value to 25 and also added a centre focus adjustment (Portrait 1).  Jeepers! I haven't posted anything for over a month. Not here anyway. Catch up time. 
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ME
I shoot for fun, with a Sony A7II, a Mavic Pro and my trusty iPhone 6s. 
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December 2018
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