Sometimes I want to live where there are dark and moody winter skies, like in my photo above for day 2 in my Year in Pictures project. But I will be content with my sunny 77 degrees Fahrenheit January day. The image below is what the skies really looked like on my neighborhood walk yesterday when I took these pictures. A little Photoshop never hurt, right? With just a tweak of my hue and saturation and an added vignette I can have skies that look a little more brooding and cozy and wintery. I also changed the photo’s orientation to vertical. I thought that my horizontal in-camera framing of the tree branches on the right of the image pointing toward in the empty space to the left would look really cool. But once I flipped the photo so the branches gnarled upward, the photo was much more compelling.

For fun, try playing around with color and orientation/framing in your own photos for new ways to see and experience every day things.