It is Day 364 of my 2011 odyssey to improve my photography skills. I have improved, I think. I have also repeated mistakes over and over. Obviously, I still have much to learn, and I am now more obsessed with photography than when I started. The day after tomorrow will mark the beginning of year two of my impossible quest for even photographic mediocrity, but I am certainly enjoying the journey.
Today’s ODC challenge, “stretching the truth,” has been a difficult one for me. Friends offered a number of suggestions, at least one of which was an X-rated subject so, although I took the photos (of statues) I decided not to use them. 😉 In the end, I decided that I’d stretch the truth with editing. Since my goal for this blog has always been to post photos SOOC (straight out of camera) as much as possible, significant editing of any photo is, for me, stretching the truth, or to use Steven Colbert’s term, “truthiness.” He defines truthiness as “the truth that we want to exist.” When I edit a photo, I try to make it be what I had hoped or expected it to be in the first place, but didn’t quite get my camera settings right for the conditions, so “truthiness” seems to fit.
Here is today’s “truthiness” photo. It is of a small creek by a park in Auburn. I wanted to make the rushing water silky by using a slow shutter speed and I liked the resulting photo but it was just a bit drab so I enhanced the photo to make it pop, using my HDR software.
Focal Length 200mm
ISO 320
f/5.6
1/50
Photomatix HDR