Photo edits

South Africa, Capturing her Beauty.

 

South Africa with it's beautiful climate is one of the best places in the world. The natural splendors that surround us are havens from city life. With so much to do and so much to appreciate, I thought I'd begin to capture some of those things closest to me.

Here is a small collection of images that I really liked. I wanted to demonstrate an effective method for saving some images that appear to be unusable. Such as in the case of this Giraffe at the Johannesburg Zoo, seen below.

 

The original image is too dark to see much detail. The greyness of the Giraffe at that moment was due to the shadows of the trees falling over the subject just before sunset.

 

I edited only the giraffe so that the coloring and detail could be restored, which is sufficient for my demonstration. However the image may now appear somewhat flat. The background could also possibly use some effects such as gentle blurring or adjusting brightness levels. But for now I am quite content to leave the image as is.

 

In this example below, the bee on the flowering Avocado tree was my focus. Unfortunately it doesn't demand as much attention being so small. A higher powered Macro Photo Lens would probably have been a good solution, but without one there are other ways to get around the problem.

 

Depending on the use of the image ofcourse, there are a few things to consider before hastily cropping, such as image size at reproduction as well as media, web or print. If it is for print then image size and quality matter the most as the default standard for images in print production is 300dpi and size must be matched according to the chosen media. Posters, banners, leaflets, magazines, range in size and so do their content.

 

For larger print formats, high resolutions are a necessity to reap the benefit of using an image, so too is the quality of the shot in terms of styling and lighting. For this example below, the final required size was at 300px width for web. Since the image is a high resolution jpeg, taken in good natural light there was minimal requirement for editing. When it comes to nature photography there is little to no control over styling. It takes patience, timing and understanding the nature of the subject, among other things to capture a brilliant piece.

 

In this photo, by an amateur photographer (yours truly), all that it needed was to be cropped at certain points before being resized. Had this image been required for print other things would need to be considered. These will likely be covered in future articles.

 

I was quite happy with the following 2 images, so I simply resized them.