Experiment in photo editing.

Last time I was in France I was lucky enough to see a traditional wedding re-enactment in the tiny village of St Germier. The whole village turned out for the occasion, all wearing traditional clothing. The wedding dress and the lace caps were original, sometimes family heirlooms . There was a procession from the little lake up through the village into the village square where the dancing took place. I’ve no idea how these people managed to dance in temperatures of 35 + . I felt as if I were melting and I wasn’t dancing or wearing a long heavy dress and gloves. 
I will do a whole blog about this one day, I have hundreds of photos and I will be posting more because it really was a lovely day. 

1. the original photo

 2. balanced and cropped using microsoft photo editing

3. starting to blur the background using GIMP free software.

4. finished photo, background blurred and some highlights using GIMP.

But for now, I’m using one of those photos as an experiment into digital editing. I’ve not really done a lot of this before, I can’t afford photoshop and I didn’t realise you could download free editing software.
Anyway, I took the original photo, altered the light and cropped it using the free Microsoft photo editing programme that every one has. Then I downloaded a programme called GIMP and carried on working on the photo. It has taken me days to get to this stage, I’ve just been doing a little at a time. It takes a lot of concentration and intense computer work. I wasn’t sure of it to start with, but now I really like the effect  and I’m very impressed with being able to do this for free. I  feel as if this is another art form, blending the background was quite like painting and I really enjoyed it. I think the finished photo has a very ‘painterly’ feel to it.
Actually, now I think about it, I like to be able to paint in a way that is almost photographic, and now I like my photos to look almost like paintings………..which is a bit odd I suppose.