Digital Photography:

The wonderful thing about today's modern digital photography, is the ease in which you can accomplish truly magical things, with little or no training. The scene at the right, the apartment complex, was taken when I first got reintroduced to this wonderful thing they call Digital Photography. There were not one, but two 10 ton dump trucks parked in the driveway [the first one is hidden by the tree]. So, I gave myself the challenge or removing them.

I started by removing the road sign; you can just see it on the right edge of the image. Then the street sign on the left. I thought I'd leave only the street sign and remove the pole so we now have a street name floating in the air. That was followed by the utility box at the base of the telephone pole, again on the left of the photo. The telephone junction box, right below the trucks gas tank was the next to go. Hey! I was getting pretty good at this, I thought. Time for something bigger. The telephone pole just behind the truck; ZAP, just like that it was gone. Now for the trucks; The first one you could see only the front and rear of the vehicle, most of it was behind the tree, but the second one posed many problems most of which was the two rock pillars at the entrance. It was not the easiest thing and it was quite intricate, but I felt pretty good at my progress as the trucks slowly disappeared.

As I look at the picture, I can see many areas of 'less than quality retouching.' But, in my defense it was one of my first jobs after learning how Adobe Elements 2 worked; and I learned everything I know from of a library book. There are a few other things in the image; The condos behind the apartments were hidden by trees and several homes were eliminated, the photo was made lighter so more detail could be seen and in general the photograph looks better. Take my advice the only way to learn photo manipulation is get a photograph and jump right in.