Zoo trip!

[imbecamiel]

Had some fun stuff happening this week! Among other things, just finished up my first month as a full karate instructor (i.e. no longer assistant-instructor-in-training). I think it's going well - I've had some good feedback, at any rate

Comments

[kriadydragon]

Dang, your phone takes better pictures than my camera. Those are some awesome pictures.

[imbecamiel]

Thank you! Usually 90% of what I take has turned out super grainy or blurry, but I think I'm finally starting to get a better handle on lighting and how to steady myself and focus things properly. It's been a learning curve. *g*

[cairistiona7]

What a fun couple of days! And what a cool zoo.

Your pictures are great! You're actually onto one of the most basic rules of phone and digital photography: get it in focus first and you can pretty it up later. :) I don't know if you've ever heard of pixlr.com, but it's a site where you can do a lot of digital post-editing for a lot of very cool effects. You simply upload your photo to the pixlr express or the more technical one that's a lot like Photoshop (and whose name I can't remember because I usually just use express), play with all the filters and then save the result as another photo. You keep you original as is but have a nifty new version of it.

Pixlr has web apps and phone apps as well. I use it a lot for photos I don't intend to share on Instagram.

[imbecamiel]

It is a really nice zoo! We were able to see more of the animal handling/enrichment than usual this time, being there so long, and it was just great to see the good work they're doing and how much they care for the animals' wellbeing. (Having read a fair amount about the history of zoos and animal handling, it makes the contrast with how far we've come all the more striking.)

Thank you! :D I've been so frustrated with my inability to figure out even the basics of photography, it's really encouraging to start to see some turning out. Oooo, though, pixlr sounds familiar, but I've never actually used it. I'm going to have to check that out! Thanks for the tip!

[cairistiona7]

You're very welcome. :) For me, learning photography has been mostly trial and error and reading a lot of articles and watching tutorials. And realizing that it doesn't have to be perfect right out of the shutter but that post-editing is definitely a good thing. I remember back when digital photography first came out, there was a lot of pushback about editing the photos, that somehow it wasn't "authentic", but thankfully that attitude has gone the way of the dinosaur.

Pixlr's express editor is what *used* to be the editor on Photobucket. Photobucket "upgraded" to a simpler editor (which is useless) so I was glad to see that Pixlr's was still out there. It has a lot of really cool artistic tools that I like to play with, as well as really good adjustment tools. And the nice thing is that everything is "undoable", so if you don't like it, you can hit the undo button or just close the tab and it all goes away and your original is still intact. :)