Five ways to customise your holiday photos
When you return from an unbelievable location abroad in the wilds of Australia, South America or Africa, or a perfect family trip with wide-eyed children and their appreciative grandparents, or a weekend break to a city boasting stunning architecture, your photographs are likely to be unforgettable.
On your return you’ll be looking at ways of enhancing them even further, placing them at various points in your normal life, or perhaps editing them with a few clicks of a mouse. Here are five ways to customise your holiday pictures…
Canvas
A giant canvas can take a dull room and transform it into something magnificent. Imagine the Grand Canyon, the Northern Lights, or the Australian Coral Reefs in giant size on a white wall, turning it from a vast expanse of nothing to a glorious vision from your past.
Options include a giant landscape, a collage of multiple shots, or a trio of three separate canvases hung together.
Mug
It’s likely to hold tea or coffee, but it might bring back the odd memory of a devastating lager from Poland, a subtle sake in Tokyo or a warming hot chocolate after a trek in Scandinavian climes. A hefty mug for home or work can be enriched by a series of photographs, and if you’ve got enough porcelain versions already then why not purchase a hard-wearing metal travel mug – perfect for your next adventure.
Calendar
A personalised calendar from Photobox is not only a creative and exciting way of showcasing photographs of destinations from Mauritius to Manhattan, but also a guide to show you where you were on a certain date in previous years. Nothing will awaken the wanderlust within you more definitively than taking yourself back a few years to that beach, or that night, or that hotel. Alternate between architecture, faces and landscapes.
This new application looks complex, but is in fact pretty easy to use. In effect Flixel pauses a video in places, but keeps the movement going elsewhere.
Here’s an example of how it works; you’re standing in front of the Niagara falls and trying to think of a way of getting a snap that no-one else has. Instead, you stand in front of the falls and your partner records five seconds. Back at home you select one still frame, and ‘paint motion’ directly onto the screen – where the water is flowing. The finished article is a photograph of you looking perfectly still, with water flowing behind you. Not cheap, but brilliant – and even available for your smartphone.
Apps
A mobile phone or compact camera might not possess the versatility of a chunky DSLR capable of altering shutter speeds and apertures, but there are a huge range of apps that can do the legwork for you without the need to swap lenses and drag heavy technology around in your backpack.
Here’s a list of 12 excellent examples, including well-established apps/social media platforms such as Instagram and Hipstamatic, as well as perhaps lesser-known apps such as Filterstorm Neue.
