Obsessed with Photo Editing

I stayed up way too late the other night playing with photos. Our guest bathroom needs some black and white prints for some frames I already have, so I went looking through pictures we've taken on trips to see if anything struck me.

First, I took these taken on our trip this past Spring and converted them to black and white using Picnik:

Eiffel Tower - even though I've seen photos of it so many times, coming up from the subway and seeing how large it is took my breath away


Arc de Triomphe

Notre Dame Cathedral

While pretty, they seemed a little generic. And then I played around in Picnik with this one taken from the top of Notre Dame and liked the mood:

Before

After

For the other one, J helped me decide to go with a photo I took from the Bridge of Sighs in Venice back in 2005. (Which I will always be fond of because someone found it on Flickr and short-listed it to be on an online travel guide...even though I don't think it was ultimately selected.) 

I was originally thinking of blowing it up along with some other photos from that trip and putting them in large frames in our living room, but we decided it was just too much with the other things we have going on in there, so it freed it up to complete the pair of black & white prints needed in the guest bathroom. I like that they're both taken from a vantage point of a well-known place, and that it's not immediately clear where the picture was taken.

Before

 The story that goes along with the Bridge of Sighs is that it was the last view of Venice a prisoner would see before being led through to the executioner (although not true by the timing of when the bridge was built)...but what a view to think of!

 After

I kind of love it in color more, so I continued to play around with some other effects on it. The cross process used below is my new favorite one to slap on every photo I upload just to see how it looks.

I haven't ordered any photos in a long time, so I ordered quite a few as long as I was paying for shipping.  The mats for the frames I'm going to use are a weird size (6x8), so I ordered from RitzPix since that was the only place I could find that offered 6x8s -- hopefully the quality is okay.  If I do end up doing some enlargements of the other photos I was thinking of, I will most likely go with Mpix and get their metallic finish. What's your favorite place to order photos from?

And since I'm loving that cross process effect, and because I found a coupon code for 2 free 8x10s, I ordered these that I took for the gallery wall in my office area:

At the Texas State Fair a few years ago after the TX-OU game...I think my friends may be riding the swings at that moment.

Point Dume in Malibu taken during a residency interview trip...J may have taken this but I think it was probably me. (We each like to think we're the best photographer.) This is also where this fave photo of us was taken by a kind stranger, which I also finally printed out!

What do you use to edit your photos? Maybe some day I'll be fancy and own Photoshop, but for now Picnik and I are BFFs.

What We Do for Fun

To keep in touch since we've moved, J and I and our nieces send each other photos back and forth of what we did that day. (And if it's particularly interesting, we include the whole family.)

Often the photos are of our respective dogs, sometimes with captions.

Exhibit A:

I love my email buddies.