The “Before & After” series is a combination of two things. It is for readers to learn a technique and take a critical look at one of their images and utilize the technique to improve it. For me, it is a chance to revisit some of my old images and improve on them now, with more experience in both shooting and post-processing.
Sometimes the images for “Before & After” pop up when I open my Lightroom catalog and accidentally move some early images. Sometimes, when I happen to open an old blog post, while searching through blog. And quite often, it comes from looking at the prints. I am not printing many of my images, but the State Fair contest entries are hanging all over my house, home and work office. I often stare at them, thinking about something else, when the idea sparks. It was the case with the Boats, and it is the case with todays image.
The older the image, the easier it is to fix. And to understand why the entry was not successful.
The “Owl butterfly” is a nice image. I like the texture on it. I like the mood, and the simple dark background. But I totally cannot understand why would I leave this white distracting branch on the top. It is not adding anything to the story, and cannot be fix easier. I didn’t even had to use Content-Aware Fill or even Cloning in Photoshop. With black background, I just used Local Adjustment Brush with Exposure at the minimum setting. And cropped square for more impact, something cannot be done in a contest entry, which needs to be 11×14.

I have a new cat at home. The second one. The first one, Ace, was featured several times on blog. Since, he grew to run the moment he sees me with camera in my hands. But he is overall not a big fan of me. The story is totally different with Torie. She doesn’t mind camera at all. She also follows me wherever I go in the house to sleep on my knees and be scratched on the head. As Ace, she renders beautifully in both color and black and white, with her rich patterns.

Now, I have used to post far more images from my iPhone. I stopped when the noise in those images started to bother me too much. But I noticed recently I am using my iPhone more and more as camera again. For example, many of my husband and I images we send home are taken with iPhone. They are simply good enough.

So now, when I am sitting on the sofa, Torie sleeping on the blanket on my laps, I am snapping a picture, or two, with my iPhone. I hope those I chose on the blog today are a bit better then your average pet snapshots. I tried.

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I am going to start with Macro Monday. This will also allow me to join the “community” at “Lisa’s Chaos” blog. Check out todays macro entries over there.

I noticed this grasshopper when I was photographing wild flowers in front of my house. He was sitting on the green handrail of stairs. When I adjusted tripod to photograph him, he moved onto inside surface. No worries, I moved too, positioned myself on the stairs and got even better view (and light). This accidental background turned out to be an excellent contrast to his mostly brown figure. Small aperture of f/11 allowed me to achieve sharp focus on the grasshopper.

What is your story?
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