Bird In The Rain Photo - Self Critique

According to my notes, I took this photo of a bird in the rain in August of 2008. The original photo, in my opinion, was not that good of a photo. For some reason, at the time that I took the photo, I must have found something interesting about it. Let's take a look at the original image.

My first thought at looking at this is that it lacks detail, color and vibrance. Again that is my opinion. Others that have seen the image did not provide any real positive comments, and that's alright with me.

After taking some time to think about this photo a bit more I think it could have looked a lot better if the image captured the total reflection of the bird in the water puddle it was standing in. Also, I noticed that I cut off a portion of the birds tail.

One more thing to keep in mind is that this image was not taken with a DSLR, it was taken with a compact digital camera that was not of a high quality.

What I did with this image made it better. Using a photo editing software called Smart Photo Editor, I applied four different filters to create this ...

I really like the colors and effect that I was able to create so quickly and easily. It is in this image that I really could see how the image could have been so much better if I had captured the birds reflection and the complete tail.

The point I want to make is to really think about what you are looking at when you compose a picture. Photo editing can only do so much but the final image is the result of what the photographer sees and captures. More importantly, it is what the photographer thinks about capturing and takes that picture.

All was not lost though, I used this image with the Instagram application and here is the results of that ...

All things considered I like the results of this image.

On another note, take time to consider what images you delete. I have made it a point to keep all of my photos and backing them up on multiple external drives. You never know, you may be able to make them better than you think.


The programs and links used for this article were ...
Smart Photo Editor http://www.smartphotoeditor.com/
Instagram http://instagr.am/
PhotoScape (for batch resizing) http://www.photoscape.org


Enjoy Life, Take Pictures!


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