Wow! The first month of summer is almost officially over! You know what that means... Obsessions!!!!! I decided to discuss my obsessions for this month and hope I can share them with all of you!
There comes a time when a writer gets to a point during their writing journey where they have absolutely no idea what to write about. I was that writer. What a better way to get over writer's block by writing about writer's block! And I am going to tell you all about how I normally get over the stressful writer's block.
The first stage of writer's block is when you start to think of ideas to write about but, can't decide on any single idea and end up frustrated with an empty blank page. Stuck. I could be staring at the wall for hours thinking about what I am interested in writing about for that certain blog. It could take me a couple hours, days... until I finally think of something.
What I do to help get my mind going...
> spend time outside (even when it's raining I still get inspiration)
> cuddle with ma wittle puppy :)
> eat food ( a ton )
> go do yoga..because of that food lol
> do my makeup and play around with looks
> take a bath (full of lush bath bombs of course)
> read a book
> drink a cup of tea and watch the sunrise
> listen to some tunes... and do whatever else it takes for me to think of something. Something that I would love to write about and be worth sharing to all of you guys.
Starting out as a blogger has been a little bit of a struggle sometimes. Writing is obviously a big part of making a blog and it always has to be something that once I push the "publish" button, I am 99.9% sure is something that I am happy with (.1% because sometimes I need to fix my grammar haha).
Writing takes me to a lot of places and I have learned that I can really share a lot about myself through it and I don't want writer's block to be an issue or a big obstacle that will keep me from writing and blogging.
Hopefully, many of you "blogees" can take a lot from this when you get writer's block and this helps you realize that you should only write about things that you love and truly feel is something that represents who you are.
This is my writing. My life. My thoughts. All on one blog.
Xoxo Nat
I was recently asked to do this blog by the amazing beauty blogger, Charlotte Crowder [charlottecrowder.blogspot.com] and I have received many questions from people on how I edit my instagram pictures.
Here are the basics:
> I mostly use my Iphone 6 to take my Instagram pictures
> I always use the "square option" on the camera app on my phone
> I normally do not use Instagram's filters and settings for my pictures
> I use two apps, Afterlight and Picsart
Afterlight = .99 on the appstore
Picsart = free on the appstore
I mainly use Afterlight unless I need some extra help from Picsart. I personally love Afterlight and think it's the best editing app out there.
Now here are the steps I go through on Afterlight.
STEPS FOR AFTERLIGHT
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1) Open the app and select the "Take a Picture" or "Choose From Library" option on the main menu.
2) Once you have chosen an option ( I chose to pick one that I already had taken on my phone)...
Select it and start editing! I chose this picture of an alley way I took in Little Italy, Boston.
It allows you to preview the picture and you can actually left swipe and preview other pics from your camera roll as well. Now select "USE".
3) Play around! I usually like to start by upping the brightness on my photos just to make it easier to see.
You can play around with how much you think you need for the picture by sliding the bar around. You can adjust the amount of a certain setting for a lot of them.
4) Then, I normally add a saturation filter to make the colors in the photos pop.
Now as you can see, the redness on the sign is more prominent than it was as well as the green awning.
I usually just play around with all of the settings and I really enjoy making a picture look different or enhanced by this app.
I like to mess around with the temperature (the little thermometer icon) to make the picture look warmer or cooler. I gave this pic a warmer tone. So you can see the browns and oranges in the buildings.
5) Sometimes I add an overall filter to my picture.
My favorite one to use, especially for selfies, is "Russ". That has to be the one I use in a lot of pictures. I like to control how much of it I want in the picture. It gives it a slightly faded look.
*** There is also an option to create a "dusty" look or add streaks as if it was manually printed and it gives a really vintage feel to the photograph. I like to stay away from this feature because it distracts the viewer and it isn't real dust or streaks anyway!
As seen above, that was just to show you what it looks like to add a dust filter but, I am just going to go back to the one I was using before.
6) Now you are given a cropping option. You can manually free crop it or crop it to a certain size. If I have a picture that was not originally a square photo, I can crop it into a square or any other shape.
7) And finally for the editing process is adding a border.
There are so many borders to choose from and so many shapes. If you have seen my Instagram, you'll find that all of mine have a slight white border all around every picture (I chose the first one given). I really like this border because it doesn't look as sloppy as having 10 different borders shown on my Instagram plus you can see the whole entire picture clearly this way.
8) FINAL STEP: SEND TO SOCIAL MEDIA! (And add image resolution size)
Et Voilà!!!! You have just edited your first photo! Congrats!
Here is what the Picsart app looks like if any of you are also interested. This is also a great app to use. It has so many other options and features. You can also make corrections on pictures like removing red eyes from the flash or whitening teeth and what not. I am not that interested in using it as much as Afterlight because I feel like the app just has so many features that I don't end up using and don't really like.
In addition, Picsart is actually a photo sharing app itself. There's a big community on Picsart that just share photos they have taken and edited. It's a really cool idea! You can make personalized albums and share them straight from the app!
I hope you all find inspiration from this post to up your game in photo taking and editing and I hope this answered a lot of questions! If not leave comments below and I'd gladly get back to you!
Thanks for reading!
Xoxo Nat
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