Silver Gull - making the most of mistakes

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Aloha dear reader and thank you for visiting my blog!!  I am sharing today about a mistake I have made, with a really lovely image, however, I've learned a lot from my mistake, and that's really what I want to share.  After completing a course with Emil Pakarklis through iPhone Photography School, iphonephotographyschool.com I now have a much better understanding about what makes a good iPhone photo.

I took this with my iPhone 5 at the beachfront on a day where the seagulls were being thrown left over takeaways from a picnic, the couple left, but the seagulls stayed behind and were eager for me to feed them too.  Unfortunately that day, I had nothing to give them, but when I motioned upward to the sky with my arm, they would fly off the ground or the perches, in search of the morsel I'd apparently thrown them (as you can imagine, this didn't go on for very long before they realised I was tricking them).  This gave me ample opportunity to shoot in burst mode.  I capture 2 to 3 great shots out of possible 80-100.  So, where did I go wrong?

The first issue I noticed, was that after I cropped this image quite a lot, there was visible grain. I could have used a tripod, to help me avoid shaking, I could have kept the original file and tried cropping it less severely, and I also could have tried some other techniques in turning it to black and white, using filters that cause less problems with resolution and compression of the file when saving it, I could have re-edited it a number of different ways also, and chosen the best possible one with the least grain.  Doing these things would have resulted in a larger image file, (as this is less than 1MB) and possibly less grain.  I could also have set exposure onto the overexposed eareas on his head and wing, to make them less overexposed, before I took the shot, by setting exposure first.  I also could have taken the photos in the native amera app which has a faster burst mode than the app I use called Camera+

Instead of deleting the photo completely, I found it still sitting in my Dropbox last night, and it really is a lovely photo, I wasn't able to just dispose of it altogether, so despite feeling a bit upset that it's really not something good enough to print out on it's own, I've realised that it might be something valuable that I can keep and use later on, as I'm about to undertake another course, this time through Bob Weil who was iPhoneographer of the Year by IPPA.  This course is about using parts of photos to make another complete image, they are called composites.  So, all is not lost and this photo could still be valuable if used as part of another piece, rather than just on it's own where the quality issues might show too much.

So, I thought I'd share it with you, after applying some texural overlays and filters, I think the grain now looks a little less noticeable and I get away with it ....just!

Thank you for reading, please feel free to share my post on your favourite social network platform and visit my art gallery at redbubble, and photo galleries at EyeEm, Instagram and Tumblr and my print shop and follow me on Facebook and Twitter,  to follow my journey see  more of my paintings, photography, drawings, writing, etc. at the links below.

Have a beautiful aloha day full of creativity my friends!