Dusting off the old photos
I took a short trip to Aruba with my wife back in 2003. We spent most of the time relaxing on the beach, but we did take a little back road drive along the less populated side of the island. I caught this guy hanging out on his perch. It looked pretty uncomfortable, but I guess it was a good vantage point for hunting. I was using my Nikon D100 back then, and I’m still impressed by the quality of the images I made with it.
This photo has been sitting in my collection since 2003. I could never quite get the photo to look as I remembered the scene that morning. I was browsing through my collection with Lightroom today, and I decided to give it another shot. I was much happier with the results this time around. A key to making it work was using the Lightroom “clarity” slider… in the negative direction. Turning down the clarity brought out some of the calm and quiet that was missing from my previous attempts.
I took this photo back in October of 2006. I had taken my wife to dinner for her birthday, and took this shot as we were leaving the neighborhood. I braced the camera on the edge of the fountain, turned off the flash, and got a pretty good result for a quick grab. I’ve been going through my catalog to get a set of shots ready for some B&W printing… I’ve added this one to the collection for consideration.