Nature Photography 104: Part 12: spring warblers

To make a very long story short, I keep finding myself annoyed with nature photography. I was very worked up a few days ago, when I became quite confident that the winner of a fairly large photo contest must have edited/doctored the photo... I then look at said persons website, and found some very blatant editing along with large amounts of shameless self-promotion as a truly expert photographer. 

This really wasn't anything new, but I learned something from it: People can do whatever the heck they want, and I shouldn't care about it. If it bothers me, I can just focus on how I conduct myself and my photography! And with that said, I had the idea to reveal some of the work done on my own photos on my personal website. 

Are you ready for a look at everything you may or may not already know about nature photography? I'll post the website version first, followed by the totally un-edited original.

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In the spirit of spring warblers, I decided to pull a whole species page for a look:

Bit of a funny story here.. I was photographing warblers on a very busy day in September a few years ago at Point Pelee... I was using flash, and the above image was one of a few that didn't fire properly... Interestingly enough, my use of flash wasn't 100% correct at the time, and the image without flash actually looked better. True story... 

When I first put this photo online years ago, I removed the stick in the top right.. Why? Possibly because I was brainwashed by online photography forums, but now I'm much happier leaving it in.. Although you'll also notice that I removed a bit of a white blob from the right (middle) edge of the image... Ah-well

All natural image from Point Pelee in May... Just walking down the road from the tip, doing some spishing and taking photos.. I cropped this one a tiny bit closer than the full frame version, which I probably wouldn't do these days, but that's juts a sign of how my preferences have changed (ha) 

This is an old one (migrant from Pelee in May), back from the days where I really had fun changing stuff and cloning out sticks.. I've always enjoyed the end result of the web version, but today I'm not happy seeing how much work had to be done to get there...... 

Funny story about this one too.. I once posted it on an online forum where the weekly "Motif" was "cropping your photo in a unique way"... and the first comment I got was "Why is it cropped in such a strange way?"... Thankfully someone else responded before I had to...

Looking back to the original series here (Part 3) I talked about some questionable practices...  If you take a look (focusing on Parula images), you'll notice the bottom image is darn similar to this one.. In fact, it was taken the same day... And actually on the same branch...

All I did was switch the song on my iPod to Black-and-White Warbler...

There is no denying that these "set up" situations provide results... And often results that "pay" (a cleaner image seems better for ads in my experience), but man I often find them pretty boring... They lack that "birding excitement" you get when getting migrants, and when the shot eventually falls into place, I typically get the "FINALLY" feeling, instead of the excited feeling..

But regardless, I just thought I'd show off some images of this species today! More in the future... (maybe a few more Warblers).