lensflare

Q: hey, what kind of camera do you have and how did you edit all of those photos? I'm going abroad and want a camera that will take awesome pictures :)

A: I have a Sony Cybershot DSC-H20

http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?catalogId=10551&storeId=10151&langId=-1&productId=8198552921665794519

it's a pretty reliable camera for quality, size, and price. i got it about a year ago (meaning there's probably a better version already out...) and it's awesome. however, being the jaded greedy tech consumer that i am, i already want a bigger and better one.

for editing, i'm simple and cheap and just use picasa, google's free photo storage and editing program:
http://picasa.google.com/

it's a very simple design and has basic editing and really cool collaging functions. it's been pretty great, but the further i get into photography and editing the more i want something complicated and costly like photoshop...sigh, a boy can dream.

most of the pictures that look intentionally over-editted, like your currently profile pic, are only so edited because they were originally very blurry and bad pictures. increasing the shadows and highlights of some pictures, saturating others, b/wing, sepiaing, cropping...all take the focus off of the bad photo quality and makes them look more grungy and intense. essentially i just play around with the program a lot haha. i also take a crapload of pictures so i may end up with a lot of bad ones, but i also get some good ones.

hope that helped! let me know if you have any other questions.