Colorful Caboose Revisited, Nacogdoches TX I found out about a cool East Texas photo competition yesterday and started deciding which three photos to enter. I think this photo makes a good entry because it’s pretty and showcases some of Nac’s railroad history. I reprocessed it using Photoshop, and this is the second photo I’ve actually exported out of Photoshop. More on Photoshop below. The second photo I chose is this beauty of the Japanese Maples in the SFA Arboretum, which I have a 20x30” print of hanging in our bedroom and really love it. For my third choice I want to enter one of my Lake Sam Rayburn photos, and have tentatively chosen this one of the warm grass on our beach at sunset. But I don’t know, this isn’t my personal favorite, it’s just the one I think will be most useful for the Texas Forest Trail Region website. My current favorite of Sam Rayburn is this blue hour beauty, but I think it might be too abstract for this competition. Another Sam Rayburn favorite is this this colorful long exposure, but again I think the long exposure might be too abstract. Lastly, my all time favorite Sam Rayburn photo is this red and pink long exposure. Can you help me decide or give any other tips and tricks for entering photo contests? This will be my first. This photo is a reprocessed version of my original Colorful Caboose photo. I liked the previous version, but wish I had used a smaller aperture to achieve a longer depth of field and sharper focus on the caboose. I also didn’t like how underexposed the caboose is, mostly due to the graduated neutral density filters I used to reduce the exposure in the sky. So what did I do to fix it up a little? I went back to the archives to see if I had an overexposed exposure from the same spot, and I did because I usually always take multiple exposures before changing my composition. I brought the overexposed photo and the original into Photohsop in that order, and layered the original over the overexposed and used a layer mask to allow the caboose from the overexposed version to shine through to the top layer. I also applied a sharpening filter to the overexposed layer so that I could get extra detail in the caboose only, without introducing too much noise, which is what would have happened if I tried to sharpen the original too much because the caboose is so underexposed. Lastly, I added a vibrance layer to exaggerate the colors a little. I’m such as sucker for color it’s hard for me to not over saturate everything! How do you like the changes? Critiques are always welcome. Daily photo: March 29, 2013, taken February 28, 2013 reprocessed March 29, 2013

nacogdochessunsettexas