capturing a moment...

Finding a great shot within a not-so-great shot is simpler than you think.
Just keep your eye on the subject or the moment. Whatever happens to be getting in the way of the shot can easily be remedied.

Take this shot for example.

First of all, we have to crop out the half of a half-naked mommy on the right side of the photo. The daddy apparently thought it would be funny to capture mommy in this vulnerable state while pretending to just take a picture of the babies.
we also have all the crap in the background that is quite frankly not ascetically pleasing.

so let's start by cropping the photo.

But due to the angle of the shot, we have to crop it at an angle.

Now, the colors here are neutral and looking a bit blah.

So let's convert it to black and white.

At this point, I put a Sepia photo filter on it. Some shots just look better with a warmer filter.

then I adjusted the exposure a bit, just to give it some final tweaks.

Now, as great as this shot looks, I wanted to frame it in black so it needed a bit of shading around the edges just to add a little depth.
For this, I used the Marque tool to draw just inside the outer edges of the photo.

Now refine your edges. I went with very low contrast to avoid harsh lines and Expanded 35+.
I also turned the featheredness and smoothness up high for a soft-focus look.

You then, Select-Inverse and Edit-Fill with black.

Finally, deselect.

Now for the poster frame.


I created a narrow white canvas first. (20 pixels)

Then I created a larger black canvas. (200 pixels)

I thought this shot would be great with some text so I selected the text tool, chose white and centered it in the black field.

Comparing the two shots, you can see that this whole process is totally worth it in the end.
What looked to be a wasted shot, turned out to be a golden opportunity to capture the sweet moment of my babies sleeping.

A big "thank you" to my hubbie for taking the original picture!