Sunday, October 9, 2011

butterfly before & after

I love butterflies and have always wanted to be able to take decent pictures of them. Our backyard seems to be quite the playground for them right now, so I decided to give it a go yesterday afternoon. What a challenge--those things are fast! I did quite a bit of chasing and took tons of pictures that barely had butterflies in them at all because I was too slow. (This was quite different from the dragonfly that practically posed for me to the point where I thought it was dead.) Somehow, though, I did end up with some decent compositions that included butterflies. The problem is, I couldn't do any focusing because of how fast they were moving, so I just had my camera on auto the whole time, meaning I didn't capture the detail I would've liked. I ended up adding some texture to these two to play up the lack of clarity, which I think made for some improvement even though it's a bit of a cop-out.  What do you think of these before-and-afters?


Saturday, October 1, 2011

I'm in a book!

I had a very exciting surprise waiting at my doorstep a couple of days ago. It was this book:


As soon as I unwrapped it, I remembered being contacted via my flickr stream last year about publishing a photo in an upcoming book of images of reflections. I submitted a few more but had long since forgotten. It turns out that these THREE photos made it:




See for yourself!




Needless to say, I'm a little bit excited. :)