Weekly Writing Challenge: Abstraction

No matter how long you’ve been blogging, there is always more to learn. As part of the Weekly Writing Challenges, once a month, we’ll highlight a feature in the WordPress.com Dashboard and challenge you to incorporate it into your blog. We want to help you take full advantage of all the tools available on WordPress.com to make your blog the best it can be — and to make your friends jealous of your web wizardry.

To participate, tag your posts with DPchallenge or leave a link to your post in the comments. Please be sure your post has been specifically written in response to this challenge; obvious attempts to link-bait will be deleted. We’ll keep an eye on the tag and highlight some of our favorites on Freshly Pressed each Friday.

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Since March is phoneography madness month at The Daily Post, this week’s feature-focused writing challenge is about — you guessed it — images! At WordPress.com, we love to help you show off your photography skills, whether it’s through a slick gallery carousel or by easily sharing photos on the go with a mobile app. But did you also know you can edit your images on WordPress.com?

For more in-depth changes to your photos — like editing color levels or adding some fancy Photoshop-esque effects — you will definitely want to use an image editor. However, if you’ve uploaded a photo onto one of your posts and realize it might look better if you cropped the edges in a bit, you can fix that without needing to leave your Dashboard. Or if you’ve inserted an amazing photograph, but realize you forgot to rotate it before uploading it to your blog, no worries! You can fix that without leaving your Dashboard as well. In fact, you can crop, rotate, resize, and flip your images all from within your WordPress.com Media Library. Nifty, eh?

I flipped this abstract photo of old farm equipment over on its side. Can you tell?

After uploading an image to your blog, there are two places where you can make these edits. The first is through your Add Media button on your Add New Post page by clicking on the Edit Image link. The second option is by going to your Media Library, clicking on the Edit link for the image you’d like to change, then clicking on the Edit Image button.  After you make your changes, be sure to click on the Update button so your changes become active. For a step-by-step guide to editing your photos on WordPress.com, check out our Support page.

Close-up! Can you figure out what this is?

For these week’s writing challenge, experiment with image editing on WordPress.com. Take one of your existing photos and rework it by either cropping it into an extreme close-up, flipping it around, or turning it on its side. Then, write a post about your (now) abstract photography skills. Need some ideas to get you started?

• Crop your photo so much so the original object is unrecognizable. Then, speculate on what this new object or thing could be. For example, in the photo above, is it a picture of an amusement park ride? A close-up of a vintage trailer? A really, really dirty mirror? Let your imagination guide you.
• Rotate one of your images like you might do when looking at an abstract painting. On which side does it look best? How does changing the rotation affect the composition?
• Flip your photo upside down and get literal. Tell us about a time when your life was turned around and everything seemed twisted.

As always, if you have any questions about editing your abstract pictures, let us know in the comments and we’ll be there to help.