What's New - Jon Bolden’s Journal

People often ask me about “enhancing” my photos. I like to use the word “develop”. When you shoot a RAW photo with a manual camera, there’s little to no interpretation involved. A simple “point and shoot” automatic camera will make interpretations about color, contrast, sharpness, and exposure. The immediate results will often be more appealing than a professional SLR shot that is RAW. The contrast is usually low, colors dull, and no cropping / straigtening made. This is the number one reason why I don’t upload photos the very next day I take them. I want the opportunity to crop, set white balance, and adjust contrast to interpret the photograph in the way I originally experienced. I also want to exclude multiples or blurry shots. The pictures tell a story and they represent your work.  Here’s a simple shot before and after with slight color increase, contrast boost, and photoshopping the hair out of her forehead.

I get a lot of flack for having many friends on Facebook. People love to make fun of me for it. They generally accuse me of “trying to look popular”, “wanting to feel popular”, or “trying to stay in touch with too many people”. All of which are marginally of insulting.

Here’s the scoop… Facebook is a social networking website. It does not reflect real life. I’ve never once consciously looked at the number of friends that a person has. Why would you? Who cares? I’ve spent zero minutes thinking about the number (except for when I get made fun of about it).

I feel lame for attempting to defend myself but I will present a few theories for the exorbitant amount of friends with the following:

A) I have traveled a lot, met a lot of friend’s roommates and friends in other cities. Playing music for awhile and crashing with strangers will score you a few folks.

B) Photographing weddings will guarantee making a few new acquaintances each time because it is such an intimate experience. You never know who you will have a nice connection with. Joey, the bride’s brother, wants to learn more about photography and requests me… Am I gonna say no to this guy and be an A-hole? Come on! (Job from Arrestd Development voice)

C) I accept any request unless I absolutely don’t recognize the name or that person gives me the willies.

D) I belong to an enormous improv community inundated with tech savvy and amiable folks.

E) When you do freelance anything, networking is the name of the game. You meet a girl at Bennu who does design but wants to outsource HTML projects, you slip her a card and she requests you. Shaboom.

I should write a “how-to” book.

So to all you haters out there, why are you counting? Are you jealous for some silly reason? I suppose I could go through and delete all the friends that didn’t quite stick in my life, but why would I waste my time. If you want more facebook friends for some reason, trying being nice to people and leaving your hometown every once in awhile.

Less hating, mo lovin’ Speaking of Mo, Happy Birthday!

I’ve realized that I want to document day to day things in my life. This is mostly because I find my memory slipping. I used to be able to remember EVERYTHING. Maybe it’s improv that’s destroying my memory. So much happens and slips away that perhaps it’s contagious in my brain. I probably will not post to this journal much anymore. I will try to use it for professional postings once I return to the full time freelance world. For my personal life, I’ve created a livejournal account. Mostly because it seems to be simple and geared towards introspection and not blogging. If you are on LJ and want to read it (for some reason) let me know and I’ll send you the url to it. I do a lot of private entries. For once, I’m doing something for just me and not publicly exposed. It feels nice!