HK$10

As mentioned, I'm off to Hong Kong in a few weeks and this allows me to experience glorious foreign money! Ours is so dull by comparison.

This shot was actually taken with my old Nikon D3000 and it's standard 18-55mm kit lens which I find is a superior macro lens to the 50mm. Obviously it has greater zoom but I also think the minimum focus distance is shorter so you can get closer in.

This shot is also an example of early experiments with post-processing. It's not something that I've traditionally liked to do. Part of it is a complete lack of experience with that type of thing but part of it is that it feels just slightly dishonest to me. I don't want you getting the wrong idea, I'm not a 'straight out of the camera' purist but for my own use, what I want is an exercise in photography, not digital art and post-processing starts you down that route where there's no difinitive cutoff. If I want to use it for correction, surely the obvious feeling is why didn't I achieve the effect with the photo itself?

Anyway, artistic insecurities aside, I did want to explore Flickr's inbuilt editing software (via Piknik.com). It's features are best described as basic but fundamental by which I mean that you can create profound effects (if desired) by playing with rudimentary settings. It also saves versioning so if, after I save the file back to Flickr, I decide I don't like it, I can hop back in and click 'Undo'. Nice.

This is one of the areas where Flickr has shone through a little bit; one of the reasons for me starting this blog was wanting to test Blogger/Picasa/Google+ interconnectivity but Picasa's inbuilt editing doesn't seem to be on the same level as Flickr/Piknik's. Obviously there are a myriad of 3rd offline and synchronised solutions but an integrated host/edit package really appeals.

In any case, the post-processing effects have certainly allowed me to turn the above shot from something decidedly unremarkable into something rather more... eye-catching? The trick now will be to resist slathering every shot in garish post-processing effects to try and make something out of nothing. Frankly I could do without the temptation.