Before or After?

I'm not that great of a photographer. I do it for fun. The majority of time I have no clue what I'm doing. I can only imagine what I might accomplish if I knew how to work my camera well. Regardless, people still tell me they like my pictures, which I love hearing. The fun part for me is editing a picture to make it look better than the original. I do this a lot, especially on Instagram. I love playing with the filters, cropping, and even using the contrast effects. Above is a picture of an ornament filled with glitter that my girls made years ago. One of my photo challenges yesterday was "Sparkly", so I took the above picture. Then I turned it into this one ...

The picture below was taken out of the car window as Rick and I sat at the stop light. I didn't even have the window down for this one.

I cropped it, changed the filter, added a frame, used the contrast effect, and I got this ...

I do the same thing with stupid-selfies too. I took this one yesterday right before Rick and I left the house to finish up our Christmas shopping. Notice the look of enthusiasm. Haha!

Again, cropping makes a huge difference, as do filters, frames, and so forth. I've posted about WYSIWYG before. That stands for "what you see is what you get". We live in such a high-tech world nowadays that most of what we see isn't really what we get. I don't know about you, but to me, it's fun to be able to tweak photographs so quickly and so easily. It's not really about taking that perfect picture. It's more about knowing how to take a crappy picture and make it into something better.