Allow Yourself Some Time to Play

Sitting up here in extreme northern Alaska the other night in the middle of a blizzard, I had some time to play around with my images and Photoshop.  I find allowing yourself to play and experiment with different tools and techniques a great boost to my creativity (not to mention becoming much more familiar with my image optimization software.)

I try not to start a "play" session with any specific goal in mind.  I'll pick an image and try things out.  When something looks interesting I continue.  If it doesn't, I'll switch gears.


For this last exercise, I grabbed a shot of a model from a recent studio course here at Light shown below.

I tried a few things and settled on the image you see below.

After that I thought why not mirror the image?  That took a little time and I ultimately built four actions to mirror anything I wanted.  Shoot me an email and I'll send you the mirror actions (hal@lightworkshops.com)

After some mirroring I tried some interesting lighting and filter techniques.

Ultimately, I probably won't use my results for anything but the exercise was great and now I have some killer Mirror Actions.

So here it is, "I give you full permission to play around.  No specific goal in mind.  Just play around, have some fun, boost your creativity, create, and learn."

Fiat Lux!

Bull