You've got . . .

Sometimes I'll open BreezeBrowser and, without looking, click on a photo album at random, just to see what's there and what pops into my head. I clicked one of the San Francisco albums and selected this photo to work on. The choices were to either delete the photo entirely (it looked washed out and wonky) or to play with it. So play I did. I altered the perspective to exaggerate the wonkiness, added some darkening here and there, as well as the heart.* When you have a crappy photo to begin with, you don't feel so serious about junking it up, for some reason. Lousy photos encourage experimentation. And if that's the case, I've got years of experimentation ahead of me! ©Carol Leigh

*Why the heart? Because there are heart shapes in the wrought iron door and my drawing a heart on the mailbox sort of ties the two together and it creates a sort of wistful feeling, I think. And because I could!

And now do you want to see the bad version? (I shouldn't do this, but I will.) See what I mean? It's awful! Usually I would never keep something like this. I can't even believe I took it!

Murals in the San Francisco Mission District

Sunday I conducted a three-hour photo walk to shoot the colorful murals in San Francisco's Mission District. There were 10 of us and we had a lot of fun finding "art within art" as well as asking Chris to walk back and forth in front of one particular mural. "Okay Chris, next time faster and take longer strides! No! Slower! Oops, I didn't get it. Could you do that again?" Poor Chris looked like a duck in a shooting gallery! These mural images depict Frida Kahlo looking on in a rather stoic manner. ©Carol Leigh