Adding Borders

As mentioned previously, I love taking digital pictures and then playing around with them. There is, however, a bit of a learning curve when it comes to digital manipulation. I can do some pretty creative things with my editing software (now) but it took me forever to figure out how to take the right kinds of pictures so I’d be able to use the cool effect I wanted. All of this trial and error invariably caused my hard drive to become a fragmented nightmare. Fortunately, some defragmentation and photography advice later and I was good to go.

Once I got really ‘into’ photography and editing one of my first big projects was making a calendar for my dad. After all, I’m his only child and my son is his only grandchild. You can probably guess what the focus of the calendar was, right? Well I wanted cute little collages and adorable borders around some (okay, most of the pictures). You know…like little hammers around my son when he was ‘helping’ grandpa build the fence. Or the little candy canes around the baby with Santa…or the bunny border for Easter pictures. Oops. Getting carried away again. My point is, borders good. The trick is having borders you can use the borders with. You see, if you have only close up shots, your borders will look like they were added as an afterthought, not so good. Conversely, if the subject is too far away, when you crop the image it could become grainy as it is made larger, also not so good.

What I finally learned to do was focus on (and eventually take) images where the subject is centered and at a medium distance. This gave me the most flexibility when cropping and adding borders.

Are you a border addict? What tricks do you use?

Photo Credit D Sharon Pruitt

June 16th, 2009 by birdievogel | Posted in Digital Manipulation | (0)