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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A fun edition of NP104... I did away with the stupid banner, but decided to leave the generic message on top. Not sure why, but then again I don't really understand most of the things I do.......
I decided to show off some photos from this spring, and since the only thing I've edited is (essentially) butterfly photos, they're on deck... I find my personal preferences are always changing, and photos I've taken two or three years ago often disappoint when I look at them today... But anyways, here's a selection of "before and after" images on some Pelee/Island lep pics.
As I've posted about, there was a lot of cool species to photograph this past May... You'll notice my insect pic originals are all square (due to the camera and format it uses), but I will always crop them, because I hate squares...
Mourning Cloak
With a lot of my recent photography, I've been trying to change as little as possible when it comes to the setting and scene elements (from what it looked like in real life)...
Painted Lady
There was several species I had never photographed "well" before, such as this Painted Lady (one of the first I saw this spring)... It is funny to me, that after the first two days, I stopped photographing this species all together (even though I had nothing I was happy with just a few days earlier, after several years of photography)... I probably could have done better than the above image, but I started focusing my efforts on the rarer species
Eastern Tiger Swallowtail
And sometimes you can't ignore some of the coolest species. I have lots of pics of Eastern Tiger, but I couldn't resist this scene... I find that my insect camera takes pictures a lot brighter than what I'm typically happy with, and end up darkening almost every single one.....
Giant and Spicebush Swallowtails
An awesome scene at Pelee on the east beach from this spring. I cleaned up a lot of elements in the sand, despite my new plans of leaving things "natural"... I just couldn't help it with this one...
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So what do you think? Think any of the originals look better than my attempts at editing? Anything you're offended by? (Or anything you WOULD be offended by, If I was trying to hide my edits?)
Anyone even find these things interesting? Because I'm going to keep doing them, so I hope so ;)
I find in every instance that the top image or original in every instance has better color rendition and clearer focus.Keep up good work.
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