Late Night Editing

There's something about looking at old photos that make you wanna tweak them again and give another feel to each one.  The photo below is one I took for my friend's online shop. 

Here's the before: 

I'm all for keeping the photo as close to the real deal (color, contrast, etc.), but once in a while its great to experiment on color, gradient, etc. to make the photo appear dreamy and hopefully more memorable.  Here's my take tonight with the help of this tutorial:

The girl doing the tutorial took a lot of steps, but I just did those that I thought would help with the photo I was working on.  She was trying to get the style of Emily Soto, who I admire when it comes to photography.  My edit and shot doesn't come close, but I'm still happy with mine.  

P.S. I'm really loving Flickr's interface at the moment, but they crash a lot!  Hope they fix that soon. :)

Cold Tone

Late night blogging.  Late night editing.

 A few weeks ago I arrived home and was surprised to find our house and neighbor houses without electricity, basically there was a brown out.  I wonder if its called brown out in other places or black out.  If you know me, I'm not the type to panic and be disappointed when there are brown outs, unless I really need the electricity (for work and for taking a bath).  In most cases, I find it as a chance to unwind.  My latest "unwinding" session was in the form of self-portrait-taking.  Long time no self-portrait actually.  I've been into self-portraits since the beginning of my Flickr life and actually think I did better back then.  I just kinda stopped when I started getting a little chubbier, when I lost my tripod, and when I just got plain lazy.  But here I am again, resurrecting my old hobby.  

A shoot with no light?  Technically, I used an emergency light, but I just wanted to challenge myself I guess and play with the light.  I had a flash, but I don't think it fired for these 3 photos.  I want to note that the last one is straight out of the camera. :)

Now, lets wait till the next brown out. :)