Oh, my avatar was the result of shooting a bird at the convalescent center where my Mom was until August 18th, 2009. I actually goofed up the shot trying to get close enough to the cage bars so they were not visible in the shot (for those who don't know, you can do stuff like that if you can get really close and focus on a subject farther away from the lens...the stuff up close is not really registered by the film/camera sensor. And with digital we have the added advantage of trying to edit out any portions which do show up and detract from a shot.
Here are the stages of the shot and a link to the final version in my gallery (oh, I suppose I am going to already break the idea of only two images per post, but I will use smaller images to make up for that part! hehehehe):
Original shot...you can see my cunning plan was in need to a turnip to make it work!
Stage 2 - You can see this is just a crop from the original and is really not too bad but still was not what I had hoped...
Stage 3 - Here I used some of the creative filters in Photoshop CS3 to make the shot look more like a drawing than a photo...it's close butt here are some harsh transitions between the color gradients in the shot giving it a look like a topographical map. You would need to look at the larger versions to see these lines...
Final Version - Made a few more adjustments and viola I had a shot I could print and give 8x10's of the birdie to a few of the residents for their rooms. One even asked if her grand daughter could have it because she really liked it and the bird was one of her fav critters in the residence...I mean geeze, it felt really nice when she asked since that was also the first time anyone wanted a copy of one of my shots, who cared if she was like 9...
You can click here on this link to see larger versions:
http://www.brecklundin.com/Getting-t...93100269_yeq36