Photo Friday: Cinque Terre in Prisma

It has been a long time since I played with the filters in the photo-editing app, Prisma. In fact, I was considering removing the app from my smartphone because the tool has limited the number of free filters and I find that I'm using it less and less.

I like applying effects to some of my photos but I don't like to overuse effects. They become boring after a while.

I began following a local weatherman on Instagram after he got more and more into his photography. I would find myself liking almost every photo that he posted. But then he discovered an app that applies motion to his images, such as moving the clouds or putting the flowing water into motion. It was great, at first, and I would show my appreciation by liking the image.

But then I found that he applied this motion effect to every one of his photos, and I found that the effect started taking away from the natural beauty of the still image. I stopped liking the photos, and soon I wouldn't even pause to look at his shots. It's as though he's relying on the app to make his photo pop.

It's too much, I find.

The same was for me and Prisma. I found that the more I used it, the less I liked my images, and so I slowed down, and eventually stopped.

Because my travel has been greatly curtailed, as it has for most of us during this pandemic, I find myself looking at photos of trips gone by. I recently went back to 2004, before I had a D-SLR, when DW and I joined some friends in Italy. My photos were captured with my Minolta X-700, on 35mm film.

When my eyes fell on the small seaside town of Manarola, in the Mediterranean region of Cinque Terre, Italy, I sighed, thinking that the multicoloured buildings, set into the hillside, made for a natural painting. My photo was good, but because it was shot with an overcast sky, the colours of the building didn't pop as they did in photos I saw when DW and I were planning our trip. It's hard to take a bad photo in Cinque Terre, but my photo wasn't great.

And then I remembered Prisma, the app that, only days earlier, I thought about removing from my smartphone. What if I ran this 35mm photo through the app, I asked myself.

I used the Watercolor filter. What do you think?

Maybe I'll keep the app a little bit longer.

Happy Friday!