Photography: More Deer and Tweaking Your Pics

Our cheap entertainment around here is watching the wildlife stop at the two bird baths that I gave Cary for our anniversary.   One is filled with birdseed/peanuts and corn.  The other is filled with water.  We have several different squirrels, a chipmunk, blue jays, doves, and other birds who eat and drink there daily.  A nice, rather tame deer also feeds there periodically.  I have showed pictures of her before.  We just learned that she is also a mom.

Monday afternoon, Cary and I were sitting in our lawn chairs next to the front door, and here she came again; to visit and enjoy a snack.  This time, Mama Deer brought her baby with her, though she told her baby to lay down and stay in the tall grass across the street from us.   Mama Deer carefully crossed the road, but she still does not know too much about looking both ways.  Or about stop, look and listen.  It was nerve-wracking to watch her return to her kid.  She started to walk in front of a car, but stopped.  She did slowly walk in front of a motorcycle; lucky for all of us that he was paying attention and was not one of the green ninja bikes that sometimes flies by here at 100 mph.

The other day, Becky asked if I enhanced my photos.   I always go through and crop them, and many times I do enhance them.  They are part of the way I do art, and I have that philosophy of "Good, better, best, never let it rest, until the good is better and the better's best."  That means that I cannot help it ... I just cannot leave good enough alone most of the time.  I need to improve good.  And, don't laugh, but I think that I am getting so used to watching HDTV that I really expect the color in my photos to look like the high definition on television does.

I have noticed that there are a lot of purists out there who are taking issue on this sort of stuff.  One photography blog that I was recently visiting said that she NEVER enhanced her photos in any way.  I wanted to ask if that also meant cropping, but she seemed pretty fussy, and I did not want to start a fight.  Another lady labels the photos that she enhances with the program that she used.

This one was untouched and not even cropped.  Even though I left the colors alone, I could have lightened up the shadows so that we could see Mama Deer's face better.  I didn't though:

This one is "saturated", and adjusted for "warmness".  A little warning here: if you saturate your colors and print them off it uses up your ink very quickly.  I think it is pretty though:

I use Picasa 3 for digital developing.  I like all the options that it gives me.  It is a free download, and I think it comes with Blogger.com to start with.  Actually, it starts out free, but I have so many pictures now that I used up my free photo space and now pay $20.00 per year.  It saves my pictures that I have posted, even if my computer crashes.  I consider the $20.00 very inexpensive for what I get out of it.