After spending over an hour to get back to WordPress Classic here I am! I hope I can remember how to do this next time. I’m told WP will support this version until at least 2022 or “as needed.” I will require that “as needed!” I was about to build my own website from scratch as creating one with HTML and CSS and doing all the layout and graphic design would be easier for me than figuring out this Gutenberg block content manager mess. But that’s just me!
Anyway, as I won’t be doing any traveling for a while I thought it would be a good idea to start a weekly (or whenever I can get to it) post with some photos from previous travels. I’ve been having fun re-processing some of my older photos as I gain more experience with Lightroom, Photoshop and Topaz. Although I adore going places and taking photos, my bigger pleasure is in the post processing.
In my twenties I set up shop in the bathroom at night with a makeshift darkroom with all the stinky chemicals… I fancied myself as the female Ansel Adams! My long-suffering partner at the time had to make an appointment to get access to take a pee. But hey, I had to put up with his stuff too… so it was more than an even exchange as far as I was concerned! Probably not from his perspective…
In 2018 some friends and I took a trip to the Canadian Rockies with wild fires raging all around us. There were times we weren’t sure if we could access certain areas. After spending a night in Calgary in Alberta, Canada, we left the next morning for Waterton Lakes National Park.
When we got out of the bus and stood on the shores of Lake Waterton I was so disappointed. The smoke blocked our views. But I just kept clicking to see what I could redeem in Adobe Lightroom when I got home. Chances were I wasn’t coming back.
I shoot in RAW and JPG. The top photo is the interpretation my Canon DSLR camera served up as a JPEG. The next photo is what I managed to salvage in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. Not too bad.
But as I am now using Topaz Labs (an amazing program in so many creative ways) as a third step after Lightroom and Photoshop, I wanted to push the image a little further.
And I’m happy with this dramatic version. When I took the photo my eye was attracted to the snowy ridge behind the lower ranges of mountains and that’s what I wanted to focus on. The camera can only do so much. It’s up to me as the artist/photographer to present what I saw in my mind’s eye!