Have you ever taken a bad picture?????

I haven't but I still wanted to share this with you (ha ha). Some pictures will never be useful no matter what you do, or so it seems. See this example - camera shake has ruined this picture. There is nothing I can salvage out of it - at least for now. But....



Since storage is cheap I delete VERY FEW pictures. The reason is - there might be a place - somewhere down the road where I can use something from that photo. Now maybe you are thinking you will never get to the point where you would want to combine photos. But 2 months ago I never thought I would be doing that. I had read a long time ago that you shouldn't throw out any pix you take so I decided not to. Now I am making photo composites like the one below and I am happy to have my own stash of pix. There are people who buy stock photography to make their composites. In the photo below there are really 4 different pix. The picture of the pirate himself, a picture of pirate flags that I warped into his sunglasses, the coin on his chain and the background.



So what if I had a picture of the beach that had something offensive or just wasn't a good shot, but some parts of it were pretty good. You can see that most of my background isn't showing. So if there was something I wanted to hide, I could do that easily in a scene like this.

What made me think of this - is I was in a photography class where I learned a lot. Another classmate had taken two photos of her son which weren't "good" shots per the teacher. But I said I would never throw them away. I know, I am contentious. One shot was a little blurry in the boys face but he was crawling, face very near the camera and there was an empty space before his hands. I would have taken that bad photo and made a cartoon out of it, and put something before his hands - like a mini Godzilla or something. I would have salvaged that picture.

The other one, I thought it was a great shot, but the teach didn't like as the boy was looking off camera at something and we didn't know what. Again, here is where composites come in, I would have extracted the boy and put him into a scene where I could have used that gaze. See the photo below. It consists of a background and an extracted photo.



Sometimes now, I just shoot scenes to use in composites. Here I shot some rocks at the beach with the sun going down. I extracted two of my grandsons from different pictures and suddenly they are climbing on Mars. I am also planning on doing set up shots of the kids so I can make more composites.



I know we all don't want to make these types of art, but until January 2009 neither did I. So you never know where your creativity or someone in your family's creativity will lead them. Don't throw out your pictures!!!!! Storage is cheap. Keyword them so you can find them and you may surprise yourself someday!

Peace - KB