3 Big Birds

2010-04-17T16:11:00.038-04:00

There I was, hanging out on a beach in lovely Central Florida just shooting the breeze (well not the breeze really but rather my sons playing in the ocean) when I spotted a group of large birds flying high in the sky making their way towards me. Being the nature lover that I am I just had to get a picture of them. Don't ask me what kind they are exactly, I just call them big birds, but they may be related to pelicans for all I know. What a great nature lover I am hey!?!

Anyway, being the great nature lover that I am (no really I AM) I quickly turned, aimed up and my trigger finger went off....SNAP! went the shutter...or is it CLICK!?! Well, however it goes I'm sure you get the picture, but sadly I felt I didn't get mine, at least that was my initial thought.

You see little did I know that prior to that shot ocean spray had landed on my lens and therefore I had a tiny water droplet on my lens that really didn't appear to be too tiny in my picture. Not only that, without the time to properly set the exposure (being the Quick Draw McGraw type of shooter I am) the bright light of the sun pretty much washed out all the sky color & I honestly thought my shot was a dud...junk...deletable as you can see here.

But I didn't delete it immediately as I thought I would because like I said before, my theory is that sometimes if you open your creative mind to it you can actually save that shot.

Eager to upload my days worth of images I jammed them all into my computer the second I got home. Skimming through them I came across my washed out, dotted up, blah shot of my three big birds. I wanted to see what it's fate would be so I opened it up using Picasa. If you don't know about Picasa yet, well let me tell you that I highly recommend it. It's a free software dowload from Google that helps you organize, edit, add text and share your photos. It's simple, fun, and very easy to use. The download is available for PC and finally for MAC now...can you say YAY! http://picasa.google.com/

With their one click button choices in the Basic Fixes tab such as, I'm Feeling Lucky or Auto Contrast and Auto Color you can immediately see a difference in your images. Sometimes the Auto Contrast is a bit much so you can opt to use the Tuning tab for more controlled changes to fill light, add highlights or adjust shadows and even the color temperature. If you're very new to photo-editing then you may be interested in getting some Picasa 3 Essential Training.

Of course I could have used some other purchased photo-editing software programs that I have such as Adobe Photoshop Elements 8, Adobe Photoshop CS4, or Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2, but sometimes to quickly judge whether I should even consider saving an image I just open it in Picasa. And that's just what I did.

After a little contrast tweaking and a decent crop of the shot I ended up with what I thought to be a save worthy image.
(Click to see it larger)

For me it turned out to be a pretty nice little artsy piece. The blue of the sky really popped and the water droplet actually added some interesting geometrical shapes to it. My 3 big birds were visible and after all things considered I was very happy that I decided to Save that Shot!

Save That Shot!

3 Big Birds