I love Van in spring!

Hey guys,

The last week was just absolutely gorgeous! Spring has finally arrived here in Vancouver, that's why everything and everyone is so nice and happy now. I am too.
In this blog post, I will show you some good examples of the "Lomography"effect of which I've been telling you about in the previous posts. Basically, Lomography pictures have a nice vignette, which makes the picture darker as it gets further away from the centre. It gets a lot more blurry as well. The centre gets sharpened up and sometimes you can see a little noise added to the pic. That's not everything by far, but just so you know at least a bit about it. It would be too much if I would tell you every little step.
I like this way of editing a lot, because I think it looks pretty cool with the vignette and the colours just give me the rest. There are special Lomography cameras you can buy, which take pictures with this effect. I don't have a camera such as this, so that's why I learned how to edit pictures with Photoshop to have this effect.

Last Sunday, I took the "beach 'n sea" picture at the Ambleside beach in West Van. It was about the third sunny day in Van. On the left you can see a little bit of the Stanley Park, which is a nice Park next to Van downtown. In spring and summer it's very nice to go for a bike ride at the sea wall there. 

This picture is from a friend who was in Hawaii. She took it there and I edited it afterwards.

I took this salad picture in Calgary, when I visited a friend. That night, we had a delicious dinner, and I thought that the salad would look pretty sweet with this effect. Here, you can see very well how it gets a lot more blurry on the outside. (have a look at the lettuce!)

For me the hardest work: Creating wallpapers from scratch

Hey guys,

I am kind of sick today, so I felt like posting my second blog entry! 

In my first post you probably noticed, that I love editing with photoshop. I pretty much edit every kind of things. Self-portraits, landscape images, event pictures. Now, the interesting thing for me is to always edit these pictures in a different way/style. One of these styles is Lomography. (I will post some real Lomography pictures in my next posts, so stay tuned!)

Another thing I really love to create are wallpapers. For me, this is the hardest thing to do and also the most time-consuming work. The second one you will see took me about 7 hours... Nevertheless, I feel really confident when I like the outcome - and I never stop before I like my own work. 

So here are two of my favourite wallpapers. For the first one I used a black 'n white smoke picture, but that's all. The second one is a wallpaper I created for one of my closest friends from Germany. I started from a white scratch paper. I really love the strong colours and also, how the light comes on from the top left corner. Oh and for the shapes... those are diamonds!

Enjoy!

Nothing better than a beer on top of the mountain

Heeeeeellooooooo guys!

I took this picture on a local skiing mountain in Vancouver when we had a beer-break.

The next day, after uploading all the pics I took on the day before, I thought: hey, why don't you edit this picture using your favourite program Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended?!

I really like this picture with the sharp beer can and the blurry background.

In the past weeks, I found myself liking to edit "Lomography" a lot. This one doesn't have a very strong effect, although I think it looks pretty cool!