Imagine if the world was only pink.
Or only blue. Pretty but something is missing.
A dog! Well, that too.
Something pinkish this way comes.
That’s more like it.
Just be sure to keep the percentage.
Cin cin to balanced life.
What happens if there is too much balance.

Pic and a Word #157: El pastel

Written by Manja Maksimovič

El Pastel

It’s as if the pinks and blues
only get to play
early in the morning
or late in the day.
Whoever came up
with this gender segregation
must be slightly upset
every time the sun
sets or rises
and the colours display
how we can all get along.

In other news, I have a too-many-photos problem. And yet my posts are getting even fewer and more far between. What to do with all these photos? How to learn to take fewer but better ones?

I sound like those who complain and then still don’t stop smoking. (That I did.)

I don’t want to stop taking photos, or blogging, but I know that I live in cycles. I just don’t know what the next cycle may be. To do something with the ones I’ve gathered, I gather.

Here is a collection of Slovenian sunsets from this summer, mostly from Piran on the Adriatic. Only the first one is a sunrise from Ljubljana – I woke up in my parents’ bedroom and took this photo from a window slit. The percentage says it all.

In response to Patrick Jennings’ Pic and a Word Challenge #157: Pastel

49 thoughts on “Pic and a Word #157: El pastel”

  2. Yes. That light. Those colours. It’s a so very serene isn’t it?
    I know how you feel about the blogging lately. If it wasn’t for Thursdays I’m not sure I’d still be posting much at all. Hopefully it’s just a phase… 🙂

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  3. Ironically, the path to taking better and (perhaps) fewer photographs includes, of course, taking more photographs.

    Not to fret… you’re already capturing some wonderfully magical moments. Like these.

    Liked by 2 people

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    1. Thank you, Patrick. 🙂 It’s my hoarding mentality. I never know what I might use one day. Also, it’s a kind of photo diary. But then I feel swamped, feeling like nothing is any good. (AS IF I do it for that reason.)

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      1. Heh… my Lightroom library contains nearly 50,000 images. There are a fair number of unnecessary duplicate files, and a fair number of varying edits of the same image, and also a fair number of slightly different exposures of the same subject. A large fraction of them are not likely to ever find their way out of the photo library — they’re just not that good, imho.

        I still have a few thousand negatives and slides I’ve not gotten around to digitizing.

        So, I feel ya! I hardly ever toss out an image. =) ❤

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        1. You made at least two of us count ours and mine are 83.629. 😮 Right here on my laptop too. Might look into this Lightroom thing. Is it online? Is it free?

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        4. This is a truthful statement. The RAW data format contains more information than can be printed or displayed on monitors. The photograph you see on your screen is often primarily a construction of choices made in post-processing to render a final image from the source data. Photojournalism is going through some ethical spasms due in part to the power of digital post-processing, but also due to the recognition that while the exosure of a negative creates a “latent image”, an exposure on a digital sensor is rather more like “data collection.” The image itself is only realized through the software applied to the collected data.

          (Interesting insights in this article: https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/17/world-press-photo-manipulation-ethics-of-digital-photojournalism/ )

          To a certain extent this was also true when post-processing involved chemistry, photo-sensitive emulsions and a darkroom.

          Even then, I looked at the negatives and transparencies I was exposing in my camera less as recording an image than as collecting light on a medium which I could use to creste a photograph in the darkroom. And I liked to experiment with different processes, both in the camera and the darkroom. I was always more interested in creating art than in recording reality. The digital darkroom offers significantly more powerful tools for doing this.

          That said, the human eye and the camera do not record the reality of a scene in the same way. (The combination of eye and mind is much more sensitive and clever and prone to scene manipulation than the camera.) Even photographers who wish to present photographs that represent the reality their eyes saw when they released the shutter are beholden to the post-processing techniques necessary to render that image from the raw (and RAW) data.

          Liked by 1 person

        5. Thank you for the detailed explanation. My camera doesn’t even do RAW (point-and-shoot). :p A new one is due… I suppose the way I (slightly) edit my photos (with very basic Windows Photo Gallery tools) is as much and as long that the end result doesn’t strike me as forced.

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        6. You might be surprised to discover your phone does do RAW. I was a couple years after I bought my Samsung S7.

          But no worries. So long as you are happy with the results of your own work =)

          Liked by 1 person

        7. Now, all that said, here is a page providing before and after images of how tools such as lightroom can be used to bring out the best of the images you have shot. This is true whether those images are in RAW or jpeg.

          Note: I am not endorsing the course this page is promoting. It is probably a very good course. However, there are plenty of free tutorials available through Adobe and other sources such as YouTube which can be equally instructive.

          https://members.expertphotography.com/p08-effortless-editing-lightroom-ad/

          Liked by 1 person

        8. Thank you so much for your help. I had a quick look at the changes they did and I do many of that already, such as bring out stuff from the shadows, but the portrait in which his expression was changed I hate with such a passion that I’m now again convinced I don’t want any of that. 🙂

          Liked by 1 person

        9. <grin> Yeah… didn’t like that much myself, and can’t recommend it. I’m not sure why it was included in a page which claims to abide by National Geographic standards for photographic excellence.

          But the rest … that’s appropriate technique for rendering the image your mind’s eye saw
          when you clicked the shutter from the data your camera collected.

          Liked by 1 person

  4. The sky in that second photo is splendid, and love to see Bestia! As for culling photos, what I usually do is to review them before editing, and cut instantaneously those who don’t make me go “Mecojoni!” (cue in Michelle Obama for a pictorial description of the expression: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/7b/0b/62/7b0b6237e2cab282345ca9d789e602f8.jpg).
    By doing this I don’t get too emotionally attached to the photos, and – voilà – numbers are reduced!

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    1. Va bene! Thanks, Fabrizio! So I’ll give each photo the “parbleu” or “perbacco” test. But it’s not a matter of getting emotionally attached to too many of them. I keep them just in case, you never know. 😀 Also, as a kind of evidence what I was up to. Also, also, how do you know Me cojoni if you’re not a romano? 😉 (My romano wants to know.)

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  7. Sky with dog, sky with boat — my faves. We used to have a lot more pink sunsets when we lived further south. I dunno why, but we did, and sometimes I miss it.

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  9. Well, I hope that your next cycle always involves a Mexi Movie The Fourth 🙂

    I share your predicament with a never-ending barrage of pictures. Following the lead of a previous comment, I opened my Lightroom catalog and counted 80,000 photos (83,992, if we’re being picky). I only publish a tiny portion of them, but hold pleasure sifting through the others, like a stamp collector looking for overlooked treasures.

    – Verne

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    1. 😮 I have 83.629 of them, just looked too. Not in any Lightroom either (had to look what this was, is it free?), but right here on my (heavily reinforced) laptop. Some are backed up but not nearly all. Yes, it’s collecting moments. We are lucky this way. Thank you, Verne, let’s hope for no. 4…

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      1. That’s remarkably close, we can make a race out of it, like two geeky stamp collectors 🙂

        Lightroom is great to catalog and edit photos (and to waste countless hours sifting through them), but it is regrettably not free. PLEASE back up your photos, laptops love to eat away pastel photos!

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  11. I struggle with the same problem (5 trips behind,most of the time I am busy with archiving street art picsand my contributions to a street art app))… . If I can give you a tip… do not photography everything what you see,every church, every square but try to see/capture things in a different perspective or position. If you see a church: click and you have a photo? no… this not really photography but ‘registration’. Look around, absorb yourself in the surroundings and see contrasts (old/new, colors, lines etc). After a while you gonna take much more less picture, and the “better” picture. Rome is not built build in one day. Don’t get me wrong Manja,really. You like photography,and maybe you wanna reach the ‘next’ level? Why not to attend a photography and learn some basic things… .They let you think about photography and after a while you gonna shoot more less, a “better” result… and save more time:). 5 Years ago, I shot everything what I saw on a trip,and fast fast upload on Facebook… I didn’t care about the horizon, composition… while this is the minimum: care about the composition and the horizon and respect your own photography(talk in general).

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    1. Thank you, Nomad. I think I take photos in the same way as I look around and save them as glimpses that really happened. Improving the glimpses would be like improving and guiding my memory. Make it better, in a way. Which borders on fake. This is a highly interesting topic. 🙂 Everybody is doing it a bit differently.

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      1. Well about glimpses, if we talk about about a few technical aspects… ISO for example, or whitebalance: even in automatic mode its never like how it real is. Sometimes I do this exercise with the people who insinuate or try to critisize to photographer who post proces their pictures(and even in your camera its already post processed but sjttt:))) ). To resume: the view what u see with your own eyes (pixels, warmth-colour) is seldom (or never) what u see on the picture and vice versa. (And has nothing to do with kind of professionalism, more about interest and passion). When i shot different shots with different settings(whitebalance), they are not so sure anymore about the thing what they saw with their Own eyes, and what they see on the picture. Its a very interesting topic, but Trying to improve the skills, is trying to understand how light works. Its a nice hard long way, but playing with your settings and in lightroom adjust the shadows/highlights is always allowed… . It does not mean you have to do this, but at least have an insight in this topic. If I walk around, shoot autumn views… the colours are never the same on automatic. Fake too?

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        2. But you spoke about fake etc?:). An important fact for me, was advices and critics from others. Its great to hear and read the lovely comments, but the next step forward is always the one who let you think about other insights. If we praise a footballplayer nonstop, after a while… stagnation. With photography its the same. Always room for improvement, always.

          Liked by 1 person

  12. Ha, ha, ha! You may be amused to hear that as I read your poem, my mind immediately picked up a cadence, and I was impressed for a split second when I assumed you had found something to rhyme with segregation! I really love the second photo, with the silhouetted boat.

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