Before and Afters - Pictures

The reason I decided to do a version of 52 Weeks of Dogs is because I wanted to challenge myself to get my camera out more. Last year was a pitiful picture year and I wanted to rectify that this year. However, the camera on my iPhone 4 makes it really easy to 'cheat.' When I forget to get my camera out for a week and realize I really need a picture now...I can snatch my phone, take a picture and just fiddle with it in apps until I get something good.

It amazes me what some of those apps can do (for all the pics shown here, I did them in Instagram). How they can turn this:

To this:


Or this, which was taken on a whim on Sunday just to show how close the trail gets to the frozen lake (and I thought it was too overcast to get any good pics, so hadn't bothered with my camera):



To one of these:

And while I love the final shots... They show that even with a crappy camera, with the right processing you can turn them into something fairly pretty. However, I want to up the challenge a bit for myself this year. When I have a real time crunch, sure, I'll allow the camera phone...but I really want to work on my photography skills with my good camera. There's so much I can do with my Nikon D40, and I've yet to venture outside of the Auto and Sports modes. So it's time to figure out just what it can do this year.