Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Indigo Bunting

1/200 | f/8 | ISO 640 | Fill Flash

I will take a break from the Acadia series and go back to one from earlier this year. I photographed this Indigo Bunting at the Fort Worth Nature Center along the marsh boardwalk back in April. At the time when I captured it, I did not like the leaves on the left side, which were also very blown out, and the IQ was not the best, so I gave it a go in Photoshop and attempted to remove the leaves on the left and leave the ones on the bottom, I never got the look I wanted and gave it up. So yesterday, 7 months later, I found it while going through my files and decided to try once again to edit it. This time around, I found myself liking the leaves on the left and had to simply tone them down with a layer mask. Also, I applied some Topaz DeNoise to the background only and selectively sharpened the bird. So while the IQ is still not really high, I think this image turned out pretty well on the second go around. And I now have a decent image of one of my favorite birds and a highly elusive one every year. I am really glad that I never deleted this image back in April! 

Hope you like it.

click image to view larger size.

Monday, November 5, 2012

Acadia Close Up

6 seconds | f/11 | ISO 100 | polarizing filter

While landscape photography is not something that I am very good at, mostly because I do not have the oppurtunity to practice it since I live in a large city, I really enjoy viewing others' landscape images and am overall a big fan of that side of photography. I was inspired while in Acadia NP to try my hand at it once again and once again I failed pretty miserably. Happily though, I was able to get one or two decent images of what I call "close up landscapes", which are detailed images of close up scenes within a landscape. It is a form of landscape photography that I find fun, especially since I am so bad at the grand landscape scenes. With this image I really like the rock and the red leaf contrasted next to the blue'ish water.  

I hope that everyone likes this image as well.

click image to view larger size.