Took this image from the bedroom window whilst playing with my big Tamron 70-300mm VC lens. Had forgotten how much fun it is as I mainly bought it for zoo visits and we haven't done one of those for ages! The VC control is awesome, freezing the image in the viewfinder, makes shooting with these long lenses much easier, especially as they are heavy to hold still!
Liked the sun just catching these last few leaves left on what is probably some bramble judging by the thorns. Normally I hate this plant, it seems to encroach everywhere you don't want it to be and it's virtually impossible to get rid of. There's a lot of it growing across the road in the borders to the open fields so probably spreads quite easily. But with the sun catching the yellow of the old leaves it looked quite golden. Cropped in Lightroom with a slight blue/orange colour grading added and a vignette along with a medium contrast tone curve added from Lightroom's built-in options. Finally created a new Export preset which adds a 60px simple white border with a single pixel outer border in 50% grey just to stop it blending into anything totally white. Reminds me of my old Polaroid snaps that used to pop out of the camera. Unfortunately Lightroom doesn't make a proper white border without rounded edges, disappointing by todays standards, so most borders need adding on Export and I use a plugin called Mogrify which allows all sorts of tweaks on Export, sizing and borders being just two of them. Normally I use this to create the usual 1px white border following by a 30px black border and again another final 1px 50% grey to prevent the black bleeding into anything black.
If nothing else, these somewhat ad hoc spontaneous images help to keep my creativity going between chances to go out for a walk. Yesterday was hampered by waiting in for Mr Amazon to deliver a parcel which I thought I had requested to come today along with the rest of the order! Not quite sure why they see fit to override your preferences and deliver early, all on the same day is easier for them and easier for me! I did manage a brief walk around the streets though later in the day so at least got some much needed fresh air even if I missed out on a photo walk ;-) Hoping that as the weather improves and the evenings get lighter at least a regular daily walk might be back on the cards. That's assuming of course that we don't get snowed in over the next few days ⛄ 😱
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