Blooms and Bloopers

The more photography I do, the more critical I become of the photos I take, and the longer it takes to correct the 'flaws' I see in them.  It's not unusual for me to take a couple of hundred photos on a hike, and post only half a dozen.  This was true of a hike yesterday to the beautiful Jack Point/Biggs Park near Duke Point ferry terminal in south Nanaimo.

I always love this fairly simple five km hike (three loooong flights of steep steps notwithstanding), for there are always beautiful seascapes, tall trees, bird life, and fascinating rock formations that make me think of dinosaur fossils.

On yesterday's hike, there were also masses of spring flowers in bloom: camus and seablush, monkeyflower and buttercups and paintbrush and chocolate lilies, as well as orange hawkweed about to bloom.  I took lots of photos, with and without dogs.

Camus

Camus and Sea Blush

Meadow of Sea Blush

Monkeyflower near a sandstone basin

But yesterday's photos also provided good examples of photographic bloopers.  Some bloopers are easy to fix. A photo with a slanted horizon , for example, can easily be improved by rotating it slightly, and dull colour can be brightened with the click of a key:

Before 

After two clicks - one to straighten the horizon, one to brighten

Others, where too little attention was paid to properly focusing the picture, are not salvageable even with the 'sharpen' tool available on many software programs.  None of the ones I took of chocolate lilies came out well - my camera was on autofocus and the settings weren't appropriate for closeup work:

Blurry chocolate lilies

But the ones that have me whacking myself upside the head are nearly always the ones that include dogs.   I become so intent on catching a great shot of the dog before he/she moves, that I forget all about watching the background.  That's why there is a tree growing out of my friend's head, when simply moving over a foot or two would have altered the background and provided a tree-free head.  Wiggly uncooperative poms caused me to miss a great photo op here, though using the crop and clone features of my photo-editing software, I was able to remove offending tree with some success:

Before - a tree grows from Pat's head

After a bit of cropping and a bit of cloning

And of course,  even without people, dog photos can be challenging.  Maggie made me laugh with these ones:

Wait a minute, mom - there's a good smell here!

Oh, wait, what's Auntie Pat doing?

Auntie Pat, are there treats in that bag?

YAWN!  Modeling is so tiring! 

Hahahaha - I love giving my mama a hard time! 

But my very favourite blooper of the day was this  next one - I was so intent on getting a nice shot of Maggie with flowers and seascape, that I failed to see a leprechaun-sized Pat placing a mini-Lexi on Mag's head.  In reality, she was well behind Maggie - probably 20 feet away, but up a hill, and thus the 'perfect' positioning of  Lexi above Mags without either Pat or I realizing what was happening. There's no fix for this.  I guess we'll just have to make sure we go back again next spring - and make sure Pat and the poms are standing behind me!