The Duck's Quack

This is big, especially in these summer months. As I have shared in the past, I love taking pictures of sunsets. The problem with that is, if you use your phone camera you will likely get some kind of lens flare in the picture because iPhone cameras just aren’t built to directly photograph the sun.

It looks a little something like this.

Okay, maybe it’s very subtle in this photo. Maybe you don’t even see it at first glance. But that little blue dot on the left of the photo isn’t supposed to be there AND IT DRIVES ME INSANE. I’ll admit this is a minor case, and it does kind of blend in with the ocean. It wouldn’t be the end of the world if I left it there. It doesn’t take too much away from the photo.

I like to remove lens flares. In previous posts I have talked about how I would bring the images into photoshop and clone stamp them out that way. I thought that was the only way but it can be annoying to have to take that extra step of going from phone, to computer, back to phone, in order to post it.

I was just playing around with Snapseed again, an app that I have talked about in the past (Snapseed & Snapseed 2.0 ) and have really grown to love.

I just learned about the “Healing” feature. This is a feature similar to the clone stamp on Photoshop. You have less control, but it is PERFECT for getting rid of these pesky lens flares and you can do it very fast!

This is the same picture without the lens flare, after using the healing tool! You would never know it was there!

The feature is most effective with simple backgrounds that are easy to replicate.

Try it our for yourself and let me know how it goes! Comment with other features of the Snapseed app you like!

To all my lovely readers, While I have very much enjoyed my time writing to you and sharing my photos and thoughts, I am afraid it is going to be a while before you hear from me again. It is finals week here at school so my time to write freely outside of an assignment is limited. My summer is going to be fairly busy as well, so I am not sure if I will have time to revisit this blog then. It may…

I love Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Love it! Surprisingly a lot of people don’t even know Lightroom exists within the Adobe creative cloud because typically when we think of photo editing, Photoshop comes to mind. Well, I am here to tell you that Lightroom does exist and it is fantastic. While I am not an avid user of Lightroom, I am definitely a fan. The main reason I don’t use it often is…

This week I did a little experimenting with the app and I have some mixed feelings.

I am usually hesitant to use photo editing apps because I usually find that they are very basic in what they offer, plus I usually like an excuse to try new things with Photoshop.

Snapseed is a little different.

Not only do they offer the typical adjustments such as brightness, contrast, saturation, etc, but they also have a wide variety of filters. They have some that change the color of the image such as the black&white and vintage shown above, but they also offer filters that can drastically change the appearance of the image.

Here’s what I mean:

The picture on the left is the original image. The picture on the left is what I came out with after all the edits I applied through Snapseed.

I adjusted the brightness and saturation a bit to get the photo looking how I wanted, then I began to test their more unique features.

I used the “lens blur” filter to blur the background and make me and my friend appear to be more in focus. I also added a face spotlight and “smooth” filter to the photo.

Here is another example of a photo that I edited with Snapseed.

I really like all of the filters and more advanced adjustments you can make to your picture perfect.

My one complaint is that when using the lens blur, it’s hard to really control what is blurred and what isn’t. You can adjust the size of the oval, but you only really have the option of an oval which isn’t always ideal.

I do think this app is really great for creating the perfect selfie though and I plan to use it a lot more!!

I highly recommend you download it and try it for yourself :)

When it comes to photography, you never stop learning. Just recently I came across a trend called the 52 Week Photo Challenge, generated by Petapixel. I found this challenge fascinating. Groundbreaking. Why you may ask? Because not only is this challenge encouraging people to self teach, but it is also motivating them to share their work. This allows photographers to search other people’s photos…

Two words: Lens. Flares.

What is a lens flare, you may ask? Well, a lens flare refers to when light is scattered or flared (hence the name), usually due to focusing on a bright light source. It is definitely undesirable and unwanted. A lens flare could be very dramatic or it could just be one ring. Or one corrupt pixel.

Unfortunately this is something I experience on a regular basis. Maybe not to the extreme of these photos above, but I definitely get an undesired effect.

Here, above is my  first example of many. What. the. heck. Now some people may not see anything wrong with this picture. Some people may see a beautiful sunset. And it is! But that red halo with the glowing green dot- yeah that’s not supposed to be there. And in my opinion it completely ruins the picture.

These pictures are from the same day and as you can see, the halo moves around. Now if you’re an observant human, you’ve probably noticed that this issue occurs when photographing the sun.

This is fantastic because sunsets are pretty much my favorite thing to photograph…

Now after I realized that this was a reoccurring issue I decided to go to the professionals themselves. Google. I spent countless hours trying to find a setting or adjustment to make this not happen anymore. I saw that a lot of people seemed to be having the same issue. I also saw this happening in a lot of photos my friends and family were posting.

When I got no answers, I decided to bring my phone to Apple and explain to them that they have a fault in their product. They told me that they had never seen such a thing! They even told me it looked like a ghost. A ghost? Can you believe it?

That was great news considering this “ghost” was clearly following me EVERYWHERE. Even at 30,000 feet.

Ultimately Apple decided to replace my phone completely because they didn’t think they would be able to fix the problem. Shocking, I know.

So I went home happy as can be because I thought I would finally be able to take sunset pics without having to photoshop out the unwanted halos and glowing pixels that show up.

As the Grinch would say, “wrongo”….

You guessed it. It happened again. I WAS SO PISSED. I came to the conclusion that all iPhone 6 plus cameras are defective.

But don’t you worry- this happens with the iPhone 7 cameras too.

The only hope I have for you is that you can try to line the  lens flare up just right with the sun so that it is barely noticeable.

Or you can just look at this as an opportunity for lots of practice with Photoshop.

Because with Photoshop we can pretend nothing ever happened. :)

When I was young I really wanted to be a ballerina. Then I wanted to be a race car driver. I also wanted to be a nurse, a cop, a firefighter and anything else you could name was probably on my list at some point. It wasn’t until high school when I really found my passion. When I was in middle school I got asked to read the morning announcements over the loud speaker. I did so well that I was…

Another way that I share my photos is I print them. I love having pictures hanging all over my room, in as many places as possible. I used to just go to CVS or Walgreens and pay around 30 cents a print to print them instantly from their photo kiosks. I was never really pleased with how they turned out. I felt like my pictures really lost quality when I printed them, so I stopped doing it.

This past fall I got a school email that Shutterfly had a promotion for students going on where you could print as many prints as you wanted for free, you just had to pay the shipping. Since I love hanging pictures and hadn’t printed in a while, I decided to give it a try. I was skeptical about what the quality of the pictures would be, but I figured the best time to try was while they were free.

I printed hundreds of photos! And let me tell you-they are vibrant! I could not have been happier!

The photos look exactly like they did on the screen (since this is a picture of the prints they don’t look as great as they do in person). The colors really pop. The texture is perfect. I have placed two more orders since the first one and I already have a folder on my phone called “next round of Shutterfly” because I have more prints I want to get.

I personally love the 4×4 size option because I think the squares look really cute when they hang. I love that Shutterfly has so many products that you can personalize and that would make great gifts. My cousin has a photo of her dog printed on a pillow and it looks adorable on her couch, especially when her dog lays next to it. I am definitely thinking of getting one of my dog.

What is great about Shutterfly is that they always have some kind of promotions going on. Right now everything is 50% off!! Not only is it a great site for you to print for yourself, but they have products for the whole family- and it’s all such great quality.

I mean it when I say I would never print pictures anywhere else again.