WATER DROPLETS

Managed to get out on a misty moist morning last week. Tut tut didn't take my tripod. Really should do so next time. This was the only one I was happy with. Have added quite a bit of contrast plus some sharpening. Also darkened down the highlights round the edge of the image to draw your eye towards the droplet.

Just looked up the info and I took this hand held at 30th but my macro lens does have vibration reduction. It was f10. Reckon if you take a tripod and get a much smaller aperture you could get the branch in focus also. Must try it next suitable morning.

ANIMALS

I meet these horses on the edge of the woods. This day they were a bit closer than normal. I do have to crawl through some brambles to get to the fence.

JANUARY - COLD

This was the last day of our hoar frost and there were a few corners in the shade where the frost lasted although by now it was very wet. The picture below show clearly that inside the woods it was much warmer.

JANUARY - COLD

There I had to go and change the saturation on this. I may or may not delete the other one.

BRRRR - I guess this is nothing to you North American Gals.

Don't know why I like this but I wish we could have the hoar frost back again. I'm having trouble with the colour on this set. I usually keep all my pics on Adobe RGB profile but the colours came out awful so I changed them to SRGB which I know you should use for the web but on the whole I don't bother as I don't notice the difference. Anyway I upped the saturation and changed the hue a bit warmer and this is more what it should look like.

I liked the frosty outline on the leaves

JANUARY - COLD

I did all sorts of things with this. I liked the composition but it started out a very wishy washy colour then looked more promising as soon as I turned to mono. I had to clone in the blown out highlights. I made quite a few conversions and layered them and cut out bits with layer masks to get the best for each part. Then when I flattened it I used Luci's Art which seems to define everything more and give it more texture. 9/10 from judge.

This one originally had the man in but I thought it made you just look to the left so I took him out. I got better marks with this - 8.5.

This was a magical morning in the woods with a wonderful hoar frost. You will see a landscape one of the same scene. This one I converted to b&w and did a print for CPS comp but the judge did not like the sun because your eyes draw up to it and he felt the main picture was of the man and dog through the trees. In fact from a distance a friend said that the sun was all you could see. I just put this in because I still like it anyway. It is already cropped and I didn't want to crop it any more. Marks 7 out of 10. They never seem to go lower than 7.