photos – Sara Garland

An Observation: Sunset Photos, Selfie Filters, and…That’s More Than One Observation

I’ve seen some absolutely incredible sunsets lately from my front door. As most people know, though, capturing a good photo of a sunset presents its own challenges. The most common complaint I hear after the shutter clicks is, “Well, it was a beautiful sunset, but it looked better in person!”

Sometimes, it can come down to adjusting a few settings in your camera. If you’re using a DSLR, you have a wider range of options than you would on your smartphone. One of my recent sunset photos is a good example of how this can work to your advantage. Mesmerized by the colors, I stepped outside and took a few shots with my Nikon. When I looked at the results, the colors looked nothing like what was staring back at me in plain sight. After I adjusted the white balance, I finally found the shot that matched my ocular reality.

Lens filters are also helpful for a variety of reasons. I own very few lens filters. These filters help to enhance what is already there, and you have to make other adjustments to your shots based on the filters you are using. Also, unless I’m specifically trying to make a photo look like an oil or watercolor painting for a reason, I try not to make a ton of adjustments when processing the prints.

Is it possible to overdo it with the settings and filters and other gizmos?

ABSOLUTELY.

And I’ve found that the perfect example to illustrate my point is the infamous selfie filter.

I don’t even really know where to find some of these filters…I’m not exactly one of the cool kids. I don’t even have the Snapchats. I’ll admit, I used to ask school photographers on faculty picture day to check for a “ten years younger” button on their camera before taking the photo of me that would haunt the yearbook for eternity, but I didn’t realize that there were filters out there that could essentially take your face back to infancy.

(Side Note: Has anyone else noticed that some facial features all but disappear through these overly-filtered filters? I’m not just talking about wrinkles and blemishes. I’ve seen an awful lot of nostrils running around without noses. It’s weird.)

However, curiosity got the best of me, so I decided to do a selfie filter experiment. Someone can let me know later if I did it right.

Here’s the “before” with no filter:

And…the after, with some kind of filter (I think):

Okay, something tells me I need to practice a little bit more on my use of filters. Or not. Perhaps I should put the selfies on the back burner and take a hike. Literally. There’s lots of nice stuff outside to photograph.

An Observation: Fancy Inspirational Thoughts

I’ve finally found a way to balance my love of photography with my need to write sarcastic statements. The whole concept was looking at me every time I opened any of my social media accounts.

Inspirational humor.

Place any statement on a beautiful background and it becomes inspirational, right? Even if the grammar and spelling are suspect, the pretty picture makes it all better (but correct grammar and spelling matter, so I’ll be really careful, because that’s who I am and this sentence is a really bad example of grammatical correctness so I should probably move on with my other thoughts). Why not have a little fun with it?

Natural beauty is all around The Natural State–hence the motto, “The Natural State.” You’ll never run out of photography options. Take, for instance, these photos from Northwest Arkansas. You have choices–street scenes, forest scenes, water scenes–that you couldn’t possibly fit into just one day of your expedition.

Buffalo Point, Buffalo National River, Arkansas.

Summer Street Scene, Eureka Springs, Arkansas.

War Eagle Bridge, War Eagle Mill, Arkansas.

Forest Scene Near Thorncrown Chapel, Eureka Springs, Arkansas.

Lovely, right?

I can’t be this serious for very long, though. So, I’ve added some “inspirational” messages to some of my photographs to satisfy the need for humor.

One part peaceful, another part goofy. It’s the least I can do to contribute to humor while exploring different locales with a camera lens.

Don’t they all look so fancy? That’s a word I need to start using more often–fancy. It’s just so…fancy.

I will do my best from this day forward to contribute further to the advancement of fancy inspirational humor. Any thoughts?

A Recollection: School Pictures

I had a school picture taken this year so that my mom could have some new refrigerator art.

Never mind that I’m a teacher now; I still think that mothers live for these kinds of things, so it was a kind of daughter’s obligation. Besides, I think it’s time for her to replace some of the old ones.

I’m just waiting on the photo at this point. (I’ll be sure to put my name, age, and grade on the back before I mail it to…you know what, those details really aren’t that important. Never mind. Carry on…)

Waiting. Does anyone else remember that? Waiting? Actually waiting for a photograph to be processed and printed before you can actually see it?

You probably have to think back to your own school pictures for that concept.

Yes, every fall, for one magical day, everyone would dress in their finest and line up for a moment sure to be frozen on the outside of the refrigerator for years to come. You’d stand in line with everyone else from your class as the teacher would walk down the row with disposable plastic combs–gotta get that hair under control because the photographer only gets one shot at refrigerator immortality–and take your seat when it was your turn. Fifteen seconds of, “Okay, sweetheart…turn your head this way, now look up, no…your other up…okay, tilt to the right…other right…your right…THERE…perfect…don’t move…now, look at Big Bird and smile! Thank you…NEXT!”

Kindergarten. A classic piece for the Garland refrigerator door. It’s probably still on some distant relative’s refrigerator. You know…the one who will call one of my parents in a few years and ask when I’ll be going off to college.

If you blinked–or, even worse…sneezed–you had to hope that your parents would be okay with letting you do the re-take when they came back to town to catch up with the kids they missed that day. (These photos went straight to the yearbook, you see. On film, you only had one chance to try to look relatively normal. I did re-takes twice–after much begging–attempting to look less like a deer in the headlights.)

After a few years, you start figuring out that you can still wear jeans as long as you wear your good shirt. Unless, of course, you just really like wearing the entire ensemble. I’d always heard that Paul Harvey hosted his radio show while wearing a suit and tie because he felt he did a better job while being dressed professionally, even though he knew no one in his audience would see him.

In the sixth grade, wearing the full ensemble has little to do with professionalism. However, this outfit did have a matching skirt that I LOVED at the time. Yes, I was wearing it. No, no one tried to stop me.

By the time you get to junior high school, you usually have at least one year that you completely forget about picture day being on the calendar. My brother wore a white t-shirt one of those years, and because our school yearbooks were printed in black and white, everything from his neck down disappeared. (I don’t have a copy of it, so I’ll just write what the old yearbooks used to print. NO PHOTO AVAILABLE.)

However yours tended to look, I think we can all agree it was a little bit of an adventure…waiting to find out how your school picture turned out. Did I smile too big? Did I not smile at all? Was there something in my teeth?

I’m still living out my little adventure by waiting on mine, so I’ll let you know if I blinked before it makes its way to Mom’s refrigerator.