Lens-Artists Challenge #134 – From Forgettable to Favorite

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This week for Lens-Artists Challenge #134, Tina invited us to show a few images that may not have met our original expectations but that through editing we’ve turned into “keepers”. I turned two originals into three edited photos. The originals are at the end of the post.

The small Alcatraz island in San Francisco was once a fort, a military prison, and a maximum-security federal penitentiary. The prison is famous because no prisoner had ever successfully escaped. The 1966 American action thriller film The Rock was filmed at this site. The film, stars Sean Connery, Nicolas Cage and Ed Harris, is about the eighty-one civilians on a tour of Alcatraz. During the tour, Marine General Francis Xavier Hummel takes the civilians hostage with the help of other Marines. He threatens the F.B.I. to launch the VX rockets. The F.B.I. is forced to resort to John Patrick Mason, an ex-con who broke out of Alcatraz in 1962, to break into Alcatraz to defuse the launch.

Sean Connery is one of my favorite actors, and we watched The Rock at least twice. Alcatraz Island fascinates me because of the film and the history. I have never taken a tour on the island, but during one visit, my friends and I leisurely walked on Fisherman’s Wharf and I took several shots of the Island.

I had a small pocket camera. The day was smoggy. I looked at the shots afterwards and was disappointed. Then something caught my eyes. A bird flew in front of the camera and showed up in one shot. I did some cropping and editing the colors and clarity to make two version, one to bring out the bird and the other with more clarity of the Island.

2017 was the first year the plum tree had an abundant blossom. I just needed the bees to pollinate the flowers. Yellow flowers were not my favorite color until this year. I had clover plant with yellow flowers popping up in early spring every year. I usually pulled them out and tried hard to replace with other plants in the same spots. But clover bulbs multiply and multiply, and there seem to be no way to get rid of them. One morning this early spring in 2017, I pulled a couple handfuls of clover plants out, but at the corner of my eyes, caught some bees hovering on the yellow flowers.

It surprised me with excitement, and I wanted to plug the plants back into the soil. From that moment on, I had a keen interest in the clover and the bees. I cropped and edited one photo of the clover and brought out the focus on the bee.

Here are the originals.

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Lens-Artists Challenge #134 – From Forgettable to Favorite

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78 comments

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