Worth Saving?

I didn’t love this shot after taking it. I didn’t really like anything I shot at this location, but I thought I’d try to create something decent. Thats really not a good approach to photography. Don’t go out and snap mediocre pictures with the hope that you can turn them into something cool in post processing.

Even after the editing, I’m not excited about this one, but I did experiment with new techniques. I shot this with ProHDR, edited with filterstorm and lenslight. I sucked detail out of the image by reducing noise a couple of times in filterstorm, which gave it a slight painterly look. Then I added some light and bokeh with lenslight.

Not crazy about it, but its better than what I started with.

More Macro!

I gotta say I love exploring the world of macro. I was going to save this for tomorrow morning, but I really like this one, so I’ll share now. To provide a sense of scale, thats a water drop on the left side of the image. I got too close at first and the water on my lens rubbed off onto the flower…oops.

Its been windy lately and some of the anemone’s got blown over. Instead of trying to do macro work out in the wind, I snapped off one of the anemone’s that was laying on the ground, but still in good shape. I brought it into my bathroom, put the flower on the counter, and set my iPhone on a container of hair gel that was just at the right height to focus on the stamen. Then I took about 30 pictures with camera+.

Just a quick edit in Snapseed to crop, add a little drama and structure, and I was done. Their structure tool is pretty awesome in their photoshop plugins when it comes to pulling out detail in an image. I seldom use it in Snapseed with my iPhoneography because it also adds noise (grain) to the image. So, if you do use it, be careful not to overdo it.