When I originally started this draft, I was focused (pun intended) on sharing how I attempted to get that perfect shot, but when I looked at the images on screen, I soon realized I would need to get a little creative with edits. Then along came Ritva with this week’s challenge. You can read her challenge here where she explains all types of editing.

For my contribution to this week’s challenge, I have a hummingbird series where, I’m using a variety of basic editing tools (cropping, color adjustments, lighting, etc.), but more specifically I’m incorporating “editing impression” where I take a more artistic approach by using the posterize, pinpoint lighting and background adjustments to obtain a more artistic feel to the images.

So here’s  how it all started. One evening, I was admiring a beautiful bloom on one of our Rose of Sharon plants and had just taken a photo of it from a distance (with the big lens). You can tell from the photo that it was off at a distance from where I was sitting.

Then all of a sudden, a hummingbird decided to hang around the same bloom and began gathering some nectar. My settings were spot on and when I looked at the view finder I just knew I had perfect shots. What I didn’t count on was because of the distance and the tiny size of the hummingbird I would need to do some serious cropping. Cropping that would ultimately make the images grainy without any sharpness whatsoever.

Once I began playing around with the filters; I ultimately came up with an editing plan and applied it to all the images. You can see the before and after by using the slider for each.

I suppose if I had worked on them a little more, I could have sharpened them up a little bit better. Quite honestly, though I’m pretty happy with the end results.

Many thanks to our host Ritva for this week’s fun challenge. If you would like to join the challenge, please be sure to tag your post with Lens-Artists and include a link back to her post Lens-Artists #410: One Photo Edited.

Sofia will be hosting the next challenge on Saturday, noon Eastern time. For more information on how to join the Lens-Artists challenge please click here.

Until next time,

~donna