A Meadowlark On A Fence Post

I've been having a lot of fun with photo editing lately. I also have been discovering a few new animals in my adventures. The bird I have for you today is a meadowlark. It's my very first one. I've been seeing them around, with their flash of yellow,but I never got pictures until now.

The pictures aren't very impressive, but you should see what they looked like before I used a few editing tricks on them. Wait, I'll show you one of them toward the end today.

The problem was that the Sun was almost directly behind the bird when I took the pictures. Bad lighting couldn't be helped, but I couldn't pass up an opportunity to get a few pictures of a bird when it was presenting itself so well to me.

I think I did quite well considering the angle I took the pictures from, and the obstructed view I had. The bird was sitting on a fence post almost right behind a warning sign. I cropped the sign out of the picture and zoomed the bird in a lot closer so you could see it better.

Here's the original picture above. It's the same source as the first picture of the post. Go ahead and click on it to get a better look. You'll see that the bird is completely dark except for the yellow of its breast. Using a few different settings in Gimp, I was able to brighten up the picture, especially the bird, without losing any of the color. Take a look below for the improvement.

A pretty good improvement, right? I'm really beginning to like Gimp. Do a search for it. It's free! It takes some time to learn how to use it, but it's worth it. It's about as hard/easy as Photoshop, and just as powerful.

Oh, the sign! I almost forgot. Here's a picture showing what's on the sign. I had to edit this picture too just to make it at all viewable. It worked pretty good too.

This Danger sign tells of the bison (buffalo) that live beyond the fence. The fence is electrified so I didn't get too close. There is a way in, which I took, but I only went to the viewing area. You can't usually see any bison because this place is huge and the bison run free here. The bison could be miles away at any time. There was evidence that they've visited though.

I had extra pictures to share this time. I hope it wasn't too many. Next time I'll share some of the scenery from here. And I'll share something not so fun that happened to me while I was at this place.

A Dreamy Fantasy Pathway

I want to share something I've been doing on my computer recently. My pal Rob Wayne over at Nature Center Magazine has been messing with different photo editing software, and he lets me know about some of the things he tries out. So I decided to start playing around with some of that stuff a bit myself.

The scene above shows the entranceway at Five Ridge Prairie Preserve. I took the picture from the inside while I was leaving. The original picture is nothing special. You can see it below. I take some pictures just to mark my place. But I learned a little technique to turn my ordinary picture into a dreamy fantasy scene.

I won't bore you with the details. I just thought it was a nice little effect. I was doing similar things before, but I have more control over things with this new way. It's kind of fun playing around with my photos like this. It gives the computer nerd in me some needed excitement.

You can see by the second picture that the two are very different. Go ahead and click on them if you'd like to compare the two. Neither is great art, but the work was fun. And the hike there was just as fun. I always say that a person should have many different interests. It's even better if you can combine a few that are really very different. I'm glad to be able to combine my love of nature with my love of computers. What kinds of things do you love where you can do this? Who knows? Maybe you can influence the rest of us.

Oh, by the way, the photo editor I used is called Gimp. It's free, and a simple Google search will find it for you. I won't say too much more because I think Rob was planning on writing a whole article about it one of these times. I just thought I'd share a bit of fun.