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©Vargas - "Friend's Graduation Shot" Many of us think that when we take pictures with our digital camera the pictures we are creating are free. This is a very important question to answer. We need to find a way to separate picture taking with the final product which is a print in our hands to admire. I ask you this question because we all tend to believe that digital photography is cheap. Digital cameras are great to home in in our skills but we have to take this picture to the hands of those who will enjoy it otherwise the pictures become lost inside the computer's hard drive, thus costing you money. What is your take. For more information look for Phototime e-magazine in July'07.

click to view Grab a flower, a black board and a flower holder and off you go. A macro lens can help also. Look from above, from below, etc. find a great angle and get the shot!!! Now the only thing left is your poetry.

click to view When visiting animals behind a glass it is important to take a camera sensity to low light. It is important to press your hands gently against the glass wall and place your camera's lens between your thumb and your index finger to hold your camera to hold steady your camera against low light. This is a sample. Go and have fun!!!

©Vargas I like how glass building tend to reflex their environment around them. That is why I take pictures of them. Next time you are next to a glass building looka t it and snap a picture it is fun. Sometimes you might get a nice reflextion off of it. In addition, I used a filter to enhance the look. Click the picture to find out.

I love flowers and it is easy to photograph them and end up with angles that anyone can take when they take their own photos. Stay away from the crow and find angles, sometimes unconfortable angles and position that will make your pictures stand out. So next time you shoot your next flower; kneel, stand higher, etc. you will be surprised of the results. Also use the macro feature if using a point and shoot camera like I did with this shot. Click the picture to find out.

A friend recently asked me to create a High Key photo and a low key photo from the same object. Look for these pictures soon.

Click to view ©Vargas When going to a stadium make sure to take a panoramic picture. Chances are your camera will not cover all the splendor of the facility. Next time you are on a stadium watching your local team do not forget to place your camera vertically and start shooting fast to cover the area with at least 5 shots. make sure the pictures overlap at least 20%. Good Luck!! Any questions? send me an e-mail. I have applied some filters to make it look like a painting. Click the picture to find out.

Sometimes if we look down on the street we might just find stuff that we can pick up and bring home to play with and take a few macro shots and have some fun. This had fallen of a tree and found interesting to photograph. I macro it and put a yellow filter and came out with this. What will you find tomorrow? Click the picture to find out.

A parking lot can also be a source of good pictures!. I found this truck parked while was having lunch. I did not lose a minute and snapped a shot. I used some filter and masks in my photo editor and found a gem of a picture. Don't you think so? Click the picture to find out.

©Vargas We do not need to go out to take great pictures of things we love. This is a example of a picture I took of my daughter's room. Even though, it might not mean anything to you, I am sure it will bring lots of memories to my daughter we she grows up. Create memories and enjoy it.

©Vargas Sometimes old photos can give you new life. This is an 2 year old photo that I had forgotten but I discovereded it again in my files. I used some filters and I got a new life off of it. Go back to your old photos and give them a boost.

©Vargas Abstracts are a good way to test the boundries of your imagination. I took a picture of this computer grill and crop it and applied a filter. There is always fun to do around the corner. Do not be affraid to experiment and test your boundries.

Sometimes rain can be a good source of great abstract photos. This is the right door of my car in the morning after a rainy night. I liked the gradation going from bright to dark and the texture that it was created by the water drops. Next time it rains in your neighborhood look around, you just might find a great picture.

I would like to thank you all for making me push hard in my photography skills. As a result, I was honor to receive all the prizes yesterday: 1st Place BEST OF SHOW 1st Place Patterns Category 1st Place Architecture Category 2n d Place Open Category I want all the club members to enjoy the winnings with me because you are part of success. You push me to be better and motivate to create better pictures. Thank you...(to be continued)

©Vargas This is the final picture. In short, I layered all my images and added the text on the roof. I created a layer for the background, the text, the skyline, the constellation and put them together. If you have any questions , please send me a note and I will be glad to go futher in my explanation.

©Vargas This is a lot of fun!!! taking pictures of car beams or any other engineering structure can be lots of fun. I took a picture while I was walking and then brought it into my studio and play with some distortion filters and voila!! a fun project for your photographic fix.

Creating images from things around the house is a lot of fun. Sometimes we do not need to go half around the world to have fun with our camera. I use a point and shoot camera, blank white piece of paper and a die cast car model, and viola!!! I little bit of edititing in never bad. Shoot!!!!

© Vargas This is a picture I took today at a Chinese restaurant I went to. I asked the atttendant if I could take a picture of the fish and she said yes. I just took a couple. Do not be affraid to ask if you see something nice where you go. Also, try to have a very small camera that no one will be intimidated by it. I took this picture and edited in PS Elements 3 and applied a Virtual Painter 5 watercolor filter.

©Vargas When visiting landmarks or famous places with friends, it is always nice to take a picture of them next to a nice and significant monument representing the site. This helps preserve a memory of the time and share, in an individual basis, and give your thanks to this person for spending time with you.

©Vargas Repetitions are always fun to photograph. The show us a sense of continuity that can be fun. In this case I wanted to show a very mundane repetition that even at that represents a good image with a little help from the computer.

©Vargas Taking picture of characters is always a great oportunity for us to remember our trips. So, do not hesitate to capture the flavor of the place by taking pictures of the people or things that make the place unique.

This is the next step to make a Freeman's picture. Now that we have our picture cleaned (see Part C) we need to look for the horizon. Freeman uses a horizon resembling a big city. Well, I did find one on the Internet. You can take a picture of it too to avoid any copyrights' violations when you sell your masterpiece. The resolution does not need to be perfect. The purpose of it is to find a relatively long skyline area of a city. Open it with PS and move it to the cleaned house, but do not show anything other than the skyline layer. Now clean the skyline to just show the buildings. Delete the sky leaving the building areas alone. Now this picture was not long enough and I had to duplicate the layer and flip the picture horizontally with my Crtl-T command grabbing the side bars to flip the image. I changed opacity to match the desired effect(see image). Once this is final, I bring the other layers into the picture( by clicking on the eye on the layer) to bring them into the pic

©Vargas There is a plethora of filters out there to enhance and sometimes destroy the look of your picture. Experiimentation is the key to this process. The more you try them the better you will know them and learn to apply them to the appropriate image. For example, this is the plastic filter in PSC2. I think this image is enhanced because the plastic makes it look like if it was plastic but you can clearly see the contrary.

Sometimes good pictures can become better pictures by simply adding some drama with available filters in our photo editing software. Do not be shy and experiment, you just might get lucky and get terrific result in a picture that otherwise would be forgotten inside your hard drive.

©Vargas Now that we have shosen the main picture for our sureal picture, we need to delete or mask the items that we do not need. Deleting objects we do not need cause a PERMANENT damage to the image you are working on. So make sure you duplicate the layer (Ctrl-J) before working on the image. I used the eraser to delete unwanted parts off of the picture but, first I used a Polygonal Lasso to select the areas that I was about to delete. This option gives me more control on the eraser and prevents me from erasing good area. I also used the CLONE command to cover up other areas that I needed enhanced or coverup. Also, I expanded the canvas to accomodate the image to make it look smaller and allow for more background. Questions? Post them here or e-mail me cvargas3@peoplepc.com

©Vargas Small objects can become a great source of inspiration. A CD served me as my background in this very slick picture. I left the CD Hole to show you the source of the background. Macro mode Canon G7.

Pictures are all over us. Next time zoom in into an object of interest. Do not just take a wide shot alone. Close-Zoomed shots can bring a different look at a common object. A comment can be made that I left a somewhat busy background, but my premise was that in order for me to associate this image to the place where it is, I had to leave a little of the background. Otherwise, leaving a just green background would have left the statue without a point of reference. Again, this is just the objective I was going after, there are many other ways that this picture could have been shown.

©Vargas ©Vargas (skyline & constellations are not mine) I finally go the opportunity to find a some what decent building that I can utilize to make it look like an old little building. Obviously, you can get better results if you go to the country and old towns that might have much better examples than this one, but due to the time limtations and lack of travel on my part; at this time this picture will do. Again, I am trying to show you how to work and get to a point where your own creativity can help and create your own fine art just like Ed Freeman's. I will show you in the next posting of this article how to isolate the part you do not want to show in the filnal picture. Get your Photoshop or Elements and let's go.