Fun with Flower Photography

This is my new favorite picture. I now have it on my computer desktop. (Click on the image - you really have to see it larger to really do it justice.)


It started as this ordinary picture of a begonia that I took last weekend at the farmer's market. I used Picnik (a wonderful, simple, and free online photo editor) to transform it. I cropped and sharpened the image. I gave it more contrast and then used their creative tools where you can select a part of an image to keep colored and focused. I turned the rest black and white and blurred the focus on that part. I know you can do all this stuff using PhotoShop, but I still find most of PhotoShop confusing. This took me 5 - 10 minutes of playing around, and I think the resulting image is pretty cool! I took some more pictures today that will allow me to use the same technique, so there may be a series of pictures coming.