Playing around with Mexican Photos

A couple of days ago, Kelly and I went to a talk given by a photographer we know. Bill Ellzey has been a professional photographer for over 30 years, and his eye for natural beauty is vivid. One of his photos has even made the cover of National Geographic, something of a pinnacle for photographers.

We both got inspired from the talk. I love playing around with photographs in Photoshop Elements, which is the much cheaper, simpler, and user-friendly version of the venerable program Photoshop. So yesterday I decided to do have some fun. On June 1, I posted a photo of a waterslide at a hot springs in Ciudad Camargo, Chihuahua. Here's what I ended up with after cropping, applying a filter, brightening the picture, and adding a frame:

One thing Bill said was that if you have a strong horizontal line, putting it midway between the top and the bottom of the picture is almost never the best choice. I hadn't thought of that, but I tried different places for the line and could see it for myself.

I have always loved photography, and look forward to doing a lot more of it when we return to Mexico. I'd enjoy doing a short photo-essay book, or maybe a series of them. A place that you can publish short full-color books at reasonable rates is lulu.com, a publishing-on-demand place that I use for my book Mexico with Heart. That book just has black and white photos, as it's too long for color to be affordable. Lulu just added the color book option recently.