I had me a time shooting this past Sunday and that was good because I really had not shot all week. Just dribs (or rather drips) and drabs here and there. Every day from Wednesday through Saturday was dank, drap, drip, rain, drizzle, gray. Put me in a real funk. After church Sunday I went to get a cup of coffee and something to eat and I walked down the street and sat in the park. Did not shoot much there, a bird or two or 4. They perched on a bench right next me and posed....it was almost too funny. I finished in the park and went in back towards Center City. I saw some flowers down a street and they happended to be on a house that has great big potted plants and hanging plants all around the corner. So I shot some of the flowers and finished and was about to leave when this Monarch butterfly literally hit me in the head and flew up to the hanging plants right above. I got the camera back out of my bag and shot more than 3 dozen images of the butterfly.
Post: Converted from raw in PSElements 3.0 with a +0.33 exposure compensation. Layer adjustments for levels, brightness/contrast and hue/saturation. Sharpen. Crop from 1.50:1 aspect ratio to 1.25:1. Cropped back to 1.50:1 and then, again to 1.25:1 ratio. Resize. Sharpen.
Statistics
Place: 45 out of 320 Avg (all users): 6.0971 Avg (commenters): 7.6000 Avg (participants): 5.8193 Avg (non-participants): 6.2846 Views since voting: 1083 Views during voting: 269 Votes: 206 Comments: 7 Favorites: 0
Lighting, exposure, color, contrast, saturation and hue are all done extremently well. Focus is excellent, and depth of field has been used quite well to isolate distracting background clutter, yet is deep enough to include as much of the flowers as needed.
About the only drawbacks I see here are that the butterfly looks a bit over sharpened. (Though I must confess that it has been too may years since I saw one this close. So it may be accurate.) And the background looks a little grainy. Not bad, but perceptable. A darker backround would have added to this shot. Unfortunately your options were limited there, because of a this being a basic editing challenge.
Overall this is a very good picture and a well deserved score. Good job.
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