One Four Challenge – February 2016, week 4

Posted on February 29, 2016 by Etol Bagam

This week I dedicate my edit of the chose picture for February’s One Four challenge to the creature that made me take the picture in the first place. The shiny giant clam.

At first I didn’t realize it was a clam (I’m not at all versed in sea creatures) because I didn’t really see the shell. But it was so big, so shiny and so pretty that I decided to go for the picture. Then I posted one of the picture I took in instagram and got a like on it from the aquarium. Visiting their instagram page was how I got to know what the creature was, as they also had a picture of it (with the blue cast! ;o).

Anyway, for this week, I again cropped the picture and changed brightness, contrast, and temperature to get to my final version, which looks like this:

This month, I must say the challenge was harder than I though it would be.
I picked the aquarium picture because of the fact that it was off color, but once I fixed that on week one, it was hard to decide what else to do with it.
Highlighting specific items on the original picture was fun, tough, although it made it feel like 4 different pictures, instead of 4 versions of the same one.
But maybe that’s the idea of the challenge anyways, right?

Editing the post to add a gallery with all the pictures for comparison, and a poll…

Original

Week 1 – trying to get the real colors to show

Week 2 – Highlighting the fish

Week 3 – Lavender-field-like coral

Week 4 – Shinny giant clam

This post was written in response to the One Four Challenge 2016 – February, hosted by Robyn. Check also my weeks 1, 2 and 3 edits.

One Four Challenge – February 2016, week 3

Posted on February 25, 2016 by Etol Bagam

This week, for my One Four challenge, I’ll again highlight a section of my picture, by cropping the image in order to show only (or mostly) the element I was to focus on.

The chosen ‘creature’ this week is a coral in green and purple that reminded me of lavender fields.

The actual name of the coral seems to be Acropora (please for the experts out there, fell more than free to correct me if I’m wrong), but I still like the call it lavender-field-like coral, just because… 😉

To show the coral well, I cropped the image, changed the temperature to remove the blue cast (like in week 1), increased the saturation and played a little with brightness and contrast until I was satisfied with the results.

I did this all before posting my Week 2 edit. Then after seeing Emilio’s comment about the lack of a focal point on my fist picture, I looked at my week 3 picture and decided to edit again, as I felt the coral as not standing out as much as I wanted to have it be the focal point (yes, I do them all more or less at the same time. Maybe not same day, but by the end of week 1 I typically have all 4 ready to be published 😉 ).

The main problem was that I wanted to highlight the purple coral, but there was another one all-green at the top of the picture that had a much brighter color, and was sort of stealing the scene. I could have tried to isolate areas and do the highlight by changing levels on each area, but that would require an app and some time I did not have. So I cropped it even more to show only the Acropora.

I’m still not 100% sure if that was really needed or not. Maybe I was just over thinking, but I’ll still stick to my edit #2. 😉

Here’s how it turned out:

Lavender and green coral in Seattle Aquarium

This post was written in response to the One Four Challenge 2016 – February, hosted by Robyn. Check also my weeks 1 and 2 edits.

And if you’re curious to see my first edition of the week 3 image, you can find it here.

One Four Challenge – February 2016, week 2

Posted on February 18, 2016 by Etol Bagam

Back to this month’s One Four Challenge.

My intention when I took to picture was to focus mostly on the giant clam and also on the lavender-field-like coral.
But then, as I took the picture, a little red fish was passing by right on top of the clam, and sort of stole the scene, becoming one of the focus points of the image.

So today, I’m dedicating the edit to it, and highlighting the little guy even more by increasing the saturation and then isolating it as the only colored element in a black and white picture.

Here is this week’s edit.

Week 2 – Highlighting the fish

This post was written in response to the One Four Challenge 2016 – February, hosted by Robyn. Check also my week 1 edit here.

One Four Challenge – February 2016, week 1

Posted on February 10, 2016 by Etol Bagam

Robyn’s One Four Challenge is back this month!!!
And once again I decided to participate.

This year, with a few changes that happened on my job, I haven’t been able to find as much time for blogging than I did last year, so I’m getting far behind with writing challenges, but the photo ones are a bit easier for me.

So it made me very happy to see the challenge coming back.

For this month I picked a picture I took recently at the Seattle Aquarium, that showed the colors quite different from what I was seeing ‘in person’. I was with friends and a bunch of kids (mine and theirs), which means I didn’t have much time to try to troubleshoot off-color pictures taken with my phone (probably the best I’d be able to do would be trying different angles, but not even that… ).

So I got the picture that didn’t reflect the actual colors, and my goal this week will be to try to make it as closer to the real thing as I can with the tools I have.

So first, here’s the original bluish picture.

Original

Some of the creatures/vegetation on this aquarium were orangey/browny, but in the picture, I got mostly blues. purples and greens. The picture also looks much darker than the real stuff, probably to balance the shininess of the big clam, that was exacerbated in the picture.

By changing the temperature of the picture and adding (just) a (little) bit more brightness, I was able to get some of the orangey tones back and got a much brighter picture.

I like the way it turned out.
I would need to go back to the aquarium to see how ‘authentic’ I was able to get, but from what I remember, I believe I got close.

This is my edit.