November # One Four Challenge – Step I

Welcome to November One Four Challenge, courtesy of Robyn from Captivate Me. Her idea is to take one of our own images and process it four different ways – sharing it over four weeks on our own blogs – one image per week. If you would like to join in the fun, please hop to her blog and read some more info.

The idea seemed interesting to me, because few times I stumbled upon images that just asked to be played with. Every week I participate in two other photo challenges, Leanne Cole’s Monochrome Madness and Stacy Fischer’s AfterBeforeFriday Forum. And many times after I post my weekly entry, I wonder if I could have processed the image differently.

So, this is my image for November. Over the next four weeks, every Monday I will post another version of this same photo.

I took this image on my friend’s balcony in October, on one of the rare sunny days we had this year. I just can’t explain how much I love it, it is not a spectacular or unusual image, but I like the details and all those gorgeous petals. When choosing an image for this challenge, I focused on this one from the start. It represents a good subject for exploring the world of post-processing, especially if you are limited in the technology department as I am.

For those of you who somehow missed it, I don’t have Photoshop, Lightroom, ACR…I haven’t even processed my images until very recently. Currently, I work in PicMonkey, free online editing software with very basic options. Although it is all very rudimentary, I found out that this situation is pushing me to look at the images differently and try to find what I can do in these simple steps of post-processing, so I would get a different result.

For this first week, I decided to make some subtle changes, marginally adjusting saturation, brightness and contrast. In the end I added the vignette, because I am a sucker for touch of darkness. It seems to me all these steps make the petals stand out more, accentuating the sunlight.

So here it is, my first One Four Challenge post. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed composing it. Any feedback would be much appreciated – do you like the original image, would you do anything different, any questions, suggestions.

Remember to come back every Monday for a new post. On the last Monday I will include a poll, so you can vote for your favorite image. I am sure the response will be overwhelming. 🙂

November Original