In the forest again

You will be aware by now that Ashridge Forest is a real favourite for me. By today I needed to get out and blow some cobwebs away and so I visited again with my camera and a selection of my current favourite lenses. In my mind I also had the topics of the club competitions for our next season, yes, I know, way ahead of myself but as I will need 12 in each category I decided to start to think early and get a few possibles saved and in the bank.

This is the first attempt, I think this could fit into either the 'Differential Focus' or the 'Worms Eye View' competition, but I think its more likely to end up in differential focus, if any at all, as its probably not near enough to the ground for a true Worms Eye View, I think I can do better than this.

Whether it ends up in either competition or not, I rather like it, and that at the end of the day is all that matters.

Moving along I came across this fellow photographer honing his skills.

A good plan, get them young.










I then got back in the car and travelled down the road to the monument, where I found the start of a classic car rally, all good fun. http://www.spiritofdacorum.com/

They had an old fire engine on display which was a firm favourite with the youngsters.


I call this pic 'Too small to be a fireman'
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Finally I went for a walk amongst the trees with my IR camera, again looking for something new. I noticed that the sun was very bright and shining through the leaves of the trees. Knowing that IR seems to work well in bright light I wondered about the effect I could get if I focused on the leaves
 

Again images I rather like, perhaps a subject to be explored further.

To edit or not to edit, that is the question.

We all know that digital photographs require a certain amount of basic editing, especially if you shoot in raw as I do, and that infra red has some additional work which needs to be done. My question is really to do with how far we need/should go. Of course the answer will always be it depends on the photograph and why the editing is being done. As I have said before filters, conversions, use of plugins etc will never rescue a poor image so we are assuming a basically decent start photograph.

The reason I am musing over this is because of the last image in my previous post, I kept going back to it believing there was something more in the image which, with some careful editing, could be coaxed out. In my mind I was imaging something a bit whimsical, prompted by the flowing clothes of the ladies mirrored in the billowing trees, also the idea of childhood being carefree and fun, how would these children remember this day?

Anyway I started to edit and came up with this version, created by cropping and adding some fractalius.

This is the original version for comparison

I think the reworked version is better, for the reasons stated above, but realise that it is sometimes difficult to be truly objective about your own work so any other opinions would be valued and taken on board.