Most of the pictures in previous posts are shown as they have been shot – no processing in Gimp, maybe only a few have been cropped. Today I spent some time on Flickr… yes I know, time warp, too many other things to do, and all that… but I really haven’t done that in a looong time, so I gave myself permission. Actually it all started by stumbling upon a photo of my hometown and then I got a little sentimental, started browsing more etc… anyway, I was inspired to try a little post-processing, nothing crazy, because you can spend hrs on that thing… just some cropping, adjusting contrast/brightness… here are the results: (I really have a lot of “…” in this post)

Here is the original picture. The bird is really too small, too much background and the colors are washed out. The problem is a slight overexposure, but also the fact that I forgot to change ISO from the day before when I was shooting inside, so it stayed at 400.

The first experiment was to crop the picture and adjust the contrast. I also changed it to bw, because I thought I had enough contrast, the bird is white and I don’t really care about the background color.

Ok, that’s better that original. But then I blew up the color photo with adjusted contrast and noticed nice yellow on the beak and legs, so I cropped it even tighter, vertical, to show just the bird.

I like that one too even though it is a completely different picture. And finally, just for fun, I Poladroid-ized this one to get:

So what to say in the end? I am a total beginner at this… but it does seem that some pictures definitely benefit from post-processing. However, where is the end to processing? There are so many tools, even in Gimp (which I am using), and you can spend hrs doing just that. I wonder how much can be accomplished by knowing the technical tricks of the photography? When you see photos on flickr… some are obviously changed, even if it does not say so, but often I wish people would disclose if the picture were photoshop-ed.(it would be nice to know what tool were used, but I know that’s asking too much).

I know I will do some processing in the future, but really my goal is to shoot and “develop” without any digital tricks. After all, Ansel Adams did not have Photoshop…