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Enhancing the enjoyment of taking pictures with news that matters, features that entertain and images that delight. Published frequently.

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29 June 2022

Almost every afternoon at 3 p.m., we take a break from whatever the day demands. We turn on the television and spend an hour watching the PBS NewsHour. It's been a grim hour lately but we wouldn't miss it.

Before Leaving. Nikon D300 with 18-200mm Nikkor at 200mm (300mm equivalent), f11, 1/125 second and ISO 200. Processed in Adobe Camera Raw.

It takes some practice to watch the longer segments of the NewsHour if you're accustomed to the brief reports of the nightly network news. Even more practice if you're in the habit of skimming headlines.

We often catch our house guests napping by 3:20.

But we aren't immune either. Today as our mind wandered during one segment, we saw this upward turned leaf of the money plant in our front window. It's been overcast all day here, gloomy enough without the news.

But what light there was showed through the leaf like an X-ray, softly illuminating the presence of life itself in the room in a way the brilliant pixels on a TV just can't.

We liked the high-key colors of both the green plant and the beige drapes. But they were not what the camera captured. We had to work hard in Adobe Camera Raw to restore them.

Then, too, plant leaves are no more perfect than human faces. There was some cosmetic retouching to do at 100 percent enlargement (quite a bit bigger than the thumbnail we present above).

We confess we enjoyed doing the retouching. It's hard to make a mistake you can't undo. And whatever effort you put into it is rewarded. You just have to know what to do.

But we found we liked the larger image, too. It's quite a different statement. More joyous, more boisterous, more gregarious than the subtle composition that caught our eye.

And after working on the image, "joyous" describes how we felt.

So we thought we'd toss that crop in here too before leaving for the day as a reward to you for reading through to the end of this without falling asleep.


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