Manipulating in photoshop

I don’t believe in manipulating pictures to make them perfect. Don’t get me wrong, I shoot in RAW so I have to make minor adjustments to bring it to .jpg and share online but to overtly change the nature of a photograph is not appealing to me at all. That said since I am writing about this topic, there must be an exception to this rule; contradictions create drama and needs explanation which often makes it a nice topic to write about.

This picture was taken in an early October afternoon, while the leaves were still gathering fall colors and summer still had an upper hand over winter. It’s a posed picture, as you can probably tell, and we precariously balance the camera on the edge of a picnic bench to use its self- timer and make this shot. Well at the last minute a father-daughter duo jumped in our orchestrated background making it rather unpleasant but for some reason I didn’t delete it.

It was Sunday afternoon and we had to get back to the following week’s preparation so we skipped taking another picture and relieved the camera of its precarious balancing misery. Fast forward to six weeks later when I was looking for a picture of DH and I to share online for announcing our 12 years of matrimony. I ended up using Photoshop to creatively eliminate the extra people in the picture. My Photoshop skills were rusty and I had limited time to fix the picture so it’s not the best editing possible but I am glad that I was able to make it work.

We received many compliments on the picture and later as I was trying to make peace within me since I crossed a new boundary, it occurred to me that what I did with this picture is exactly what marriage/relationship is all about. There is bound to be distractions in life but as long as the two people in relationship are committed to keeping each other in focus and central, other fade away in the background anyways...

Here's to our 12 years together....