A few months ago my wife asked me to shoot some pictures in the yard on a frosty morning. It was a Saturday and I was kind thinking, “are you serious? It’s like 15 degrees out there”. Her response was typical, “It’s sunny it doesn’t feel cold at all”. This she says from the comfort of the sofa in front of the fire.
So I lumbered out into the yard with my trusty old Canon 50d and a 90mm f2.5 Tamron SP macro lens. I found this little leaf suspended by the tiniest spider web thread. I shot some other stuff in the yard but this image intrigued me enough to play around with it in three different editors. Corel Photo Paint, Google Picassa and Photoshop Lightroom.
The original mostly unaltered version is to the left. Then I dinked around with color, saturation, lighting and some masks to try and create additional moods for the image.
I actually use Photo Paint for most of my pixel editing, I have always liked that software. For playing around with basic tinting and exposure/lighting, etc. it is hard to beat Adobe Photoshop’s Lightroom 5. I am generally annoyed with the Lightroom system of cataloging as it can be a pain in the ass to load images from the disk without using the catalog. Picassa lets you double click an image anywhere and it loads quickly.
I have always liked a sort of natural abstract image. The long 90mm focal length coupled with the extreme close focus distance left a soft background to work over with color and effects.
This is kind of a short essay this time, I am really busy this week. I hope you like the image. Which version do you like the best?
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