mud pies to medicine: Woopsy

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Woopsy

Sometimes you happen upon a beautiful Inn while walking around a snowy Vermont town and take a photo only to realize once safely fireside later that night that you never reset your white balance from that time you took photos in a really yellow house and now your picture is completely blue. Okay, maybe this exact scenario is rare but it has happened to all of us. We got one shot and it aint pretty! Mine in particular was this Inn. The white balance was completely off in this crazy custom mode and it was cold so I didn't take much time to compose it and I didn't have a tripod (gasp don't tell Scott Kelby) but I want to share the picture. So what do I do? Photoshop it into submission. Below is the original: crooked and blue.

Original

Did I mention this was from before I did my shooting in RAW so fixing this isn't quite as easy as it might have been otherwise but it was really a quick fix after a couple youtube tutorials. I went to Image>Adjustments>Levels and selected the dropper on the right to set a better white balance which honestly did not do much. The best thing I did was apply a warming filter to cancel out a lot of the blue. De saturated a bit and decreased the brightness and contrast. I'm pretty much a novice at photoshop but I'm pretty happy with the result. Not quite right but better than it was and definitely presentable!

In case your wondering this is the Inn in Woodstock, Vermont. I fell in love with this town while visiting my friend Kate. This is the type of place where you pay at the general store using your phone number (which they know anyway), there is one tavern in town, and people stop their car so you can take a picture of a tree across the street (actually happened). This town has a wonderful little brook and river which means they got hit pretty hard by Hurricane Irene but they did as small towns do and really pulled together. I highly recommend a visit sometime especially given it's location near Killington Mountain.

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The inspiration you ask?

I miss making mud pies. There is this huge rock in my front yard. To call it a rock really does it a dishonor. It is a boulder, brought home by my father on a huge dump truck after he blasted it out of a work site. My mom one day told me that even though it is nearly 2.5 feet high, 6 feet long, and 2.5 feet wide, that it was, in fact, only half-showing. The scientist inside of me was disbelieving and set out to get some proof. Clad in a dress, bow in my hair, and my best accessory, a shovel, I trudged outside ready to prove my mother wrong. That is when the digging began. I dug, and dug, and dug, and nearly all 3.5 feet of Danielle fit in that hole when I had reached the bottom of the rock. That became my digging spot, my mud pie kitchen. Each day it was dug, and each evening it was filled back in. Sometimes the holes were small, sometimes they were enormous, and most days the hole was turned into my mud mixing bowl with that rock as my counter. The novelty never wore off. The ebb and flow of my childhood was, in many ways, measured by the ever-changing depth of that hole in the front yard, the hole that never really disappeared even each day after it was filled in. Even though the grass has grown back in that spot, there still remains, an indentation, the scars of a childhood well lived and the disbelieving scientists I have always been.

So, you ask me why I want to be a doctor? I do not want to be a doctor. I want to open a mud pie bakery with the cash register on that rock in my front yard. But, somehow, I doubt I would stay in business long, for the world seems to have lost its taste for mud pies. I guess being a doctor will have to do.