This was another Photoshop exercise. I took this photo at a recent butterfly show at the Krohn conservatory. Unfortunately, it was a very dark and rainy day, so it turned out pretty grainy. But I liked the image because the girl had such a mysterious expression- an inscrutable smile, you could say. She reminded me of a young version of the Mona Lisa, so I wanted to see if I could fix the photo. I thought it would be cool, since it was grainy, to make it appear to be an old sepia print, with the butterfly in color to make it stand out more. I ended up calling my son, who guided me through the process of making a mask, etc., to accomplish this, which we finally did. Another problem was that the girl's face was at the edge of the frame, so there was a lot of unwanted space behind her. We were able to kind of blur this out and make it darker, but the yucky composition still bugged me, so I cropped it. My son said it was not "professional" to crop the frame, and that it was still too grainy. I had hoped to enter it in a photo contest, but because the quality isn't what it should be, I guess I'll just chalk it up to a learning experience. I still like it this way, though.
Very sweet. What a precious moment in time you have captured.
ReplyDeleteShe really does have that Mona thing goin' on...wonderful shot, love the contrast of the B&W with the color of the wings.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if I said it wasn't professional. I might have said that you won't retain the ratio you would need for a standard photo size. One thing that I have learned about photography recently though is that breaking the rules can result in some pretty awesome stuff.
ReplyDeleteYes, I'm a big fat rule-breaker, as I believe I've stated before. I'm not sure why photos have to even have a standard size; sometimes it seems we just take these things for granted without ever questioning them. We don't think about it because it's "always been that way." I wonder why that size became the standard, and who decided it? Hmmmmm....
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