Nimavenl - Nicole's Random Ramblings

Part of my 'mission' as an amateur photographer sharing photos with the world is to show off the beauty of the natural world around me. To urge people to "Look at what's around you, look at how amazing this planet is and appreciate how beautiful your home is."  While I edit photos to get rid of scratches and spots on the lens of my camera, I don't usually like editing them to the degree that they become fake-looking. Yet lately, that is exactly what I've been enjoying - changing photos so much that they clearly look edited. In last week's Photo Challenge post , I added four edited photos at the end. Our world is beautiful just the way it is and showing off that beauty through my photos is something I love doing. Yet lately, editing photos to make them look a little different and strange has been great fun, too. So this week, my Photo Challenge post will feature edited images. Not because the world looks better when edited or Photoshopped, but because...

Downloaded a trial version of the program Picture Collage Maker and played around with it today while waiting for dinner to be ready. (Yes, I cooked. Gasp! It happens every once in a while. Don't let it alarm you...) The program is easy to use, probably has the simplest Terms and Conditions I've ever read and playing around creating this collage was lots of fun. The (light grey) watermark in the centre of the image disappears once you buy the product. Seeing I quite enjoyed taking these photos and turning them into a collage, this was definitely not a waste of my time! When graffiti / street art / urban art is done in a nice way, I can appreciate it. The big, colourful letters for instance, those I think are 'nice'. When (what I see as) ugly looking tags are added or sprayed over the nice 'pretty' and 'artsy' stuff, that ruins the effect for me and turns art into ugly. In this case, I think it's a pity that the pretty art is covered by me...