Showcasing the beauty of Mother Nature
While I could have zoomed in on this rhino and created a standard portrait, I thought keeping things wide and showing the rhino in the landscape was far more effective for this scene. Had we been driving fast, we probably would have missed it completely, as most of the time the head was down and the horn wasn’t visible, making it easy to mistake the rhino for a rock (and vice versa).
May there always be rhinos to peacefully graze.
Wishing you an excellent week ahead.
During this month of revisiting old work, I’ve had the opportunity to take many trips down memory lane, remembering amazing moments in nature and the challenging times trying to work out what to do with my camera to make the image that appeared on my LCD match the thought I had in my head.
What this monthly topic has hammered home is that the gear doesn’t matter, its what you are able to do with it. The software used to edit images doesn’t matter, its understanding how to make the tools work for you in the best ways possible. These things get said time and time again, but they really become apparent when you start reviewing a collection of work gathered over time that has been captured and edited with a variety of different resources.
No one looking at my images is going to say “You shot that on this camera body and then you edited it with that software program. There are times when I have been out shooting with more than one camera and once the images have been uploaded to my computer, I don’t know which image was shot with which body, without checking the info panel!
At the end of the day, the only thing that should matter is if the image moves you in some way.
And with that, here are a few images I have reworked this week. I hope you enjoy, and please check back next Sunday to find out what the topic of the month will be for March.
The photo challenge this week was to show something, or someone, sweet. If that isn’t an invitation to share photos of elephants, I don’t know what is. Or maybe that’s just me. 🙂 So here are a few images featuring some adorable baby elephants seen last year on my trip through Southern Africa.
Enjoy!
Before I get into today’s post, I wanted to say sorry for the lack of activity over the past week. I made the plunge to move to a new self-hosted website so I could combine my blog and gallery (something I have wanted to do for over a year now). And while the internet does make everything appear to be instantaneous, moving 4+ years of blog posts, migrating a domain to a new hosting provider and setting everything up just takes time. Especially when you aren’t a web professional! My gallery is very much a work in progress, but the blog is up and running as usual, and fingers crossed my followers have been migrated over properly so someone, besides my Mom, has the chance to read this 🙂
I was hoping to get this posted yesterday, but the Happiness Engineers at WordPress just finished with the behind the scenes work to get my followers transferred to the new site. So this post is better late than never.
Given all the behind the scenes work I have been doing, I am really glad I didn’t choose a topic that required me to get out shooting this week.
The photos below don’t have much rhyme or reason, other than they caught my eye when scrolling through my picture folders with the thought that I might be able to make something a bit better out of it now than I could when I shot it.
I hope you enjoy today’s selections, once I get the gallery up and running, I’ll post a note about that and start looking for some feedback on the redesign.
For the then and now section this week, I chose this image of the Sand River at sunrise captured in 2013 on my first journey to Africa. I actually quite like the original edit that I did, so I tried to interpret it in a bit of a different way, focusing on the warmth and the fog on the updated edit.
Another week, and another trip down memory lane in terms of my photography. I’m really glad I made the decision to work on images already captured for this month, as we got rather buried in the snow the past week, and I haven’t had the time, or the energy, to get out and try and capture anything new.
This week is a mixed bag of images, shot locally and in Africa, in colour and black and white.
For my then and now image, I chose this zebra from my first trip to South Africa. The original black and white conversion was done in Lightroom using a few basic adjustments, not long after I returned from my trip. The updated image was edited recently using a combination of plugins in Photoshop, including MacPhun Tonality and Topaz Detail. I’m sure I could achieve similar results simply using On1 Photo Raw (I’m not using Lightroom any longer for processing), but I like the ease of using Tonality for black and white edits.
Please visit:
www.jennifersawickyphotography.com for wildlife, landscape and nature inspired artwork.
and
https://shopvida.com/collections/jennifer-sawicky for textiles inspired by my photography.
I truly have been blessed with the leopard sightings I have experienced over the years.
Please visit:
www.jennifersawickyphotography.com for wildlife, landscape and nature inspired artwork.
and
https://shopvida.com/collections/jennifer-sawicky for textiles inspired by my photography.
For February, I have decided that my topic for the month will be revisiting old work. It was one of the shortlisted topic ideas that I had come up with back in December, and lately, it is a concept I have been encountering over and over in the educational resources I am working through, in articles that I read and podcasts that I have been listening to. I think it is an excellent concept as there have been improvements in photo editing software over the years, plus I’ve added a lot more tools into my editing toolbox and my skills at editing have improved with time and practice.
I am going to try to look for a mix of images that I can show both a then and now edited version of an image, and also work on images for the first time. I am sure there are many images that I passed over throughout the years because I simply didn’t have the skills to correct for errors in the field, difficult lighting scenarios or heavy noise.
Here is my first instalment of revisiting old work:
It’s been fun rooting through my photo catalogues for old images to work on. Pop by next Sunday to see what else I turn up.
Please visit:
www.jennifersawickyphotography.com for wildlife, landscape and nature inspired artwork.
and
https://shopvida.com/collections/jennifer-sawicky for textiles inspired by my photography.