Joshua Tree Road Trip

Been slacking on writing and I realized that I'm about to go on another desert trip but I haven't even posted photos from my June trip...

On this trip I wanted to take photos with the mindset of breaking the "rules". You know, don't shoot straight on, don't shoot into the sun or mid-day, blah blah. But I did, so here's what I was happy with:

Hello mid-day sun!

Sometimes I shoot in color...

You can check out more on my Flickr album HERE. I'm going back this week to work on night shots since it'll be a new moon! Hopefully I can get some shots of the Milky Way but I'm flying down this time so I'm bringing limited equipment. I'll post on exactly what I brought with me and how well (or not so well) my shots came out!

-Helen

Editing on the cheap

News flash... I don't own Photoshop and I've never used it. That shit is expensive! When I really started learning about editing I had Flickr and their trusty (albeit limited) editing tools. But that worked just fine for me and my style. A couple years after I joined Flickr they made some changes, got rid of their editing tools and went with a simpler interface that had a lot less tools. Thankfully, the company behind the initial Flickr editing started a new company called PicMonkey. A lot of their features are free and easy to use. You can start with a free trial and go from there, but it's still pretty cheap.

After using PicMonkey for a while I realized I was going to need to invest in better software if I kept pursuing this love. I broke down and purchased Corel's PaintShop Pro X4. I was mainly drawn to Corel simply because of the price. It's abut half the price of Photoshop and to me, totally worth it. The only drawbacks I have are when I'm reading a how-to article on editing the articles always show step-by-step directions in Photoshop... total bummer. However, I've been able to recreate a lot of the same instructions in PaintShop. It just took a little more time... and maybe a YouTube tutorial.

What editing software do you use? Are there any out there that are cheaper, better, faster? Do you think PaintShop sucks, and Photoshop is where it's at? Leave me a comment and let me know.

New Website

Dagot'ee! - that's Hello in Apache!

At the behest of a very good friend (hi Chris!) I've invested in getting my website and this blog started. My goal is, obviously, to show my work but to also give other photographers tips, tricks and step-by-step guide as others have given to me. However, my main objective with this blog will be to do as much of this on a budget as possible. A serious budget. No, for real.

When I started actively pursuing photography 7 years ago I had very little money (still do, actually) but I was on a serious budget back then called unemployment. I had very little to work with but I saved whenever I could to purchase a camera that would allow more manual settings than a point + shoot. I spent months searching Craigslist and finally found a Canon G11 that was well within my budget (it did have one broken dial, but hey - I said I was on a budget)!  It wasn't the camera I always wanted (still don't have that) but it was a great place to start.  That little powerhouse of a camera helped me grow in leaps and bounds! And because it was so small compared to a DSLR it taught me a very valuable lesson - always have your camera on you!  How can you experiment and learn if you don't have your tools on you?

So with that in mind, I hope that you find something here that will help or inspire you to do great things with very little.

-Helen