Progress! and Fiddling with the Sunset

I had three goals - no, four! Four goals! - for this weekend.

1. Sleep! This was my one-word answer to my boss's question about my plans for the weekend.
2. Catch up on email. At one point last week I was up to 80 unread emails on the one screen name I check every day.
   
3. Clean around the house.
4. Get some work done on Mages.
   

So, how have I done so far?

1. Friday night/Saturday morning and afternoon I got about nine hours of sleep. Saturday night/Sunday morning I went to bed at 5 AM and got up four hours later for church. After church I went to bed for six hours. Now it's almost 4 AM again, but I can sleep in. So no points for getting on a reasonable sleep schedule, but I'm doing pretty well on the actual getting of sleep.
   
2. Most of my unread email was FeedBlitz alerts, going back to August 8th or earlier. I got through them all. I didn't comment on every blog I read, let alone every entry, but I read through everything except some of the memes. The only blogs and journals I'm still behind on (aside from blogs I don't have on alert) are the ones on my LJ friends list.
   
3. I've done almost no cleaning so far, but I have big plans for Monday.
   
4. I'm still on Chapter Three of Mages of Mâvarin, but I have made some progress on it, especially while waiting for blogs to load on my dialup connection.

Fiddling With the Sunset

Among the many old postings I read today was one from Julie that I'd somehow previously missed, called "A picture discussion." She wrote about the levels of photo editing that might be used in journalism (not journaling, journalism), ranging from cropping and color correction to more severe and deceitful photo manipulation. It got me thinking about how much I typically do to my pictures, especially sunset photos. Usually I mention when I've boosted color saturation, autocorrected lightened or darkened, but not always. To be honest, I sometimes lose track, especially when I'm editing a handful of similar photos at the same time. For example, here are four versions of tonight's sunset:



This one I boosted the saturation on, but only a little. The original looks very similar. The camera doesn't really capture the colors quite as strongly as my eyes do, so I don't feel too guilty about doing this, as long as it's not too extreme. Or, if it is extreme, I try to cop to it.




This one I pushed the saturation on by "50" (percent?) or so, and then applied an "oil painting" effect. I was trying to do kind of an homage to Maryanne's colorful paintings.




This is the more-or-less unadulterated version of the same shot, other than being cropped to get rid of the cars in the driveway and a tree on the left. I let the flash go off on this, and then switched to sunset mode on the camera.




I think this was Sunset mode, Effect 2. It's cropped, saturated a bit and probably autocorrected, not in that order.

Aww, heck. I don't know exactly what I did to each photo. But you get the general idea.

Karen

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