A walk in the woods

No point in asking permission to take liberties because I already have! (Ask forgiveness afterwards - it's easier). I was taken to task by a member some years ago, who said, "For heaven's sake will you please sharpen your images!" I did, and there began my own post-processing journey. This is a similar sort of reaction that I hope will be equally useful .....

There are some nice ideas here and some lovely things seen which, to my mind, would benefit from being taken from the original snapshot, via some post processing, into digital art. For example, rows of the same or similar items shout "pattern", so I grabbed that and cropped to present the most orderly part of the scene to emphasize that pattern. Before that, however, I had FastStone Image Viewer (it's both free and excellent) denoise the original - you'd be amazed at how noisy even the nicest of images can be!. That done, a judicious amount of sharpening (in FastStone) produced a rather different result.




Close-ups are really susceptible to the effects of camera shake, which can be seen in the acorn , top left of the leaf in the final image. When you find a super scene, like this one and you get an encouraging initial shot, come back later or the next day with a tripod. Dial the ISO down as far as possible because shake won't be a problem, frame the image using live view (magnified a bit) and turn OFF auto focus. Focus it manually because your eye is always better in this situation. When you are happy, trip the shutter with an IR release or cable release so you don't touch the camera at all. With a 'flat' view, like this one, you can open the aperture as wide as it will go since the depth of field will be same across the entire frame. If the subject has depth, then close the aperture just enough to get all of it in focus - pull the On/Off button to the right to activate the Iris stop down while in live view. This will show you the result of closing the aperture.

Father Ted: please forgive me for making a tutorial out of your lovely images. As I said, someone else did it with mine and it transformed how I worked so I hope the same will happen as a result of this.

If we waited for the weather then there would be very few images posted - the colouring on your set shouts Autumn, and the fungi shots I like in particular. David has presented a good alternative version but I'd be happy with either.

Keep shooting, keep processing and keep posting

They certainly work for me. It's got me thinking I should be doing more close ups instead of my habitual landscapes and distance scenes.

The whole set are well thought our and shot, my pref is the very last one thou,

I use one of these ( with a small ball head ) a well engineered mini tripod that'll go completely flat and is ideal for fungi.