Finishing Images

Today was field trip day for my photography class. As usual we went to the Detroit Zoo which offers a good variety of things to take pictures of indoors and outdoors with varying lighting conditions which leads to many unique photo opportunities. I split the class in half and did an early afternoon session and a late afternoon session. In both cases, we never made it to the animals because we found lots of other things to take pictures of.
I am a firm believer that the image capture is only the first half of making a good image. I love to finish my pictures in Photoshop to dress them up. Here are some examples of the final image along with the out of camera image.

There is a small museum area in the same building as the butterfly house and the bird aviary. This is a hand rail on the second floor. I really liked the sweeping lines and shapes that the hand rails created. I flipped the image horizontally so that the sweeping lines would lead the viewers eyes into the image. I added a heavy amount of contrast and saturation to bring out some of the unique colors that existed in the photograph along with helping to eliminate some of the distracting elements that took away from the patterns.

There was a watertank with some words on it. I loved the blue lighting and the bubbles coming up. Unfortunately the bubbles would be really blurry with a normal picture. I used a slow shutter speed and followed the bubbles as they rose up which made the text get streaked which I thought looked kind of neat and abstract.

In the same area was some really cool windows and I loved the softness of the light coming in the window. This needed a boost in contrast, some softening, some added color saturation along with a bit of distortion to make the composition a bit more pleasing.

These two birds were screaching at eachother but it looked like they were good buddies. This was a very simple edit…just a bit of a crop and brightening up the color.

This was inside the bird aviary. I left the industrial look of this scene and added a heavy amount of contrast along with a light bluish tone to give it more of a cold industrial feel.

These little worms were laid out as bird food and I liked the complimentary colors with the rich oranges and blues in this scene.