Rainy Day Photography

Before & After

It's been raining the entire day almost, which limits my photographic adventures to the four walls of my house. Above you'll see a picture I took of the pots and pans waiting to be put away.
Since it is a gloomy day without much ambient light, the photo turned out a bit dark. (See image at the left). After I corrected it in Lightroom, it miraculously looked much better. (See image at the right). Although I am still a dunce when it comes to using Lightroom, it has some very cool features. For example, there is a vibrancy slider that increases the color saturation of only certain parts of your image. This is much better than using the saturation slider, which affects the entire image. Secondly, I discovered the vignette tool that corrects for the vignetting in images. Vignetting is when the corners of your image are dark because of the lens.

After using Lightroom on a trial basis, I decided to take the plunge and purchase it. Likely I will have to take a workshop to learn how to use all the bells and whistles of Lightroom.

Onto a separate topic, I watched a couple famous films on DVD yesterday: Annie Hall and What's Eating Gilbert Grape. Annie Hall was directed by Woody Allen and mostly about his main character's relationship with a woman called Annie Hall, played by Diane Keaton. It was released in the 1970's, but sometimes you couldn't really tell that from the clothing, which I found interesting. "Gilbert Grape" is a much different animal. It's about a Gilbert Grape's (Johnny Depp) struggle to hold his family together in a one horse town in Iowa. His family consists of an obese mother, 2 sisters and a mentally handicapped brother played by Leonardo Dicaprio. It's quite a moving story. Watch it if you can. I just borrowed these from the public library.