Monday, September 19, 2016

Reflections on the water. With ducklings.




Well ... fudgesickles, as Dave says. A couple of hours' excursion to the national park turned into a priceless photo op, with the most amazing stuff right in front of the camera ... and it turned out, the light levels were too low for a compact digital to produce more than a handful of good pictures, counterbalanced by a huge amount of dross headed for the bin. So here I am turning some of the shots into art, by messing about in Irfanview...




Yeah, okay, the art is dandy, but I'd rather have had a swag of top-notch photos! There were ducklings, and parrots, and miners, and a darter ... birding is a hobby of ours. On the rare occasion when the camera actually got its tiny little brain around the job, I came up with pictures like this:



That's a darter, in the "above" shot, and the magpie and miners in the "below" shot. You can't imagine the shots that got away. Sigh. Well, as someone wise once said, "You can't get a coconut every time." So ... let's put some of the lesser dross through the process and resurrect them as art:


These were all done in Irfanview, just pushing and pulling color values, over-driving contrast, blurring and sharpening. Some really neat results. But ... oh, the opportunity that just went walkies! Better luck next time. And next time the light levels are low, I'll click the whole thing over to full manual ... cut some of the technology out of the loop and do it the old fashioned way.