June Image of the Month

It was a great month for my photography, especially if you like flowers. There are lots and lots of choices for Image of the Month! Many of them are peonies, and the insects around them, but there are a few tulips, and landscape shots, and some of the shots qualify as macros, and there's an artsy shot in there as well. 

I was working on trying to better capture the red peony. I tweaked some camera settings, and did the editing a bit different, and I think they came out better. The problem is, I'm not sure what the computer and mobile device monitors are doing to that. I put a red peony on instagram, and my phone made it look kind of awful. I blame Instagram.

But, to business. I took 1459 photos over the month and edited 316 of them. Of those, and I think this is a record, 32 ended up with 4 stars, and 2 of them ended up with 5 stars, which pleases me. Those are preliminary numbers, of course, assigned along the way. I'll be looking to see if done any of the photos an injustice by ranking too high or low. 

A few days later I boiled it down to 7 finalists, and I'm stuck. Decisions, decisions.

Remember: 

3 stars means I liked it enough to edit it and export to a social media version. Sometimes there are several slightly different versions of the same shot. Some shots are edited purely for documentary reasons, ie, this is what that thing looked like at this date time.

4 stars is tricky. These are better than most of my shots. Better could mean a great subject in great light, or (what I think is) really good composition, or a rare / unusual subject, or something technically difficult that turned out really well. Lots of times I wished I had a 3.5 or a 4.5 star rating, but I suppose that would just complicate things and slow me down. 

5 stars make me go WOW! There might be any number of reasons driving that response. Normally there is little or no doubt about this rating.

So let's get this rodeo out of the chute, as one of my characters likes to say.

Maybe this is cheating, but I'm going to have to go with an honourable mention for only the second time since late 2016, plus the usuals. (The last such mention was here, in image of 2018. And whoopsie, I fixed the link, now it goes to that post.) Why? It's an unusual shot and one that I keep coming back to. I remember taking it, and deliberately composing the rose in front of the clematis fuzzy blossom thingie. Except it's white, and I didn't do anything to turn it blue. Nor do I have any idea what the white splotches are around the rose bud are. I didn't put them there, and there's no white flowers near there. The different background leaves frame things nicely and with the bud poking out of the lower right I get a sense of depth. I didn't do anything unusual to process this image, and yet I'm fascinated by the result.

Second Runner Up

Even when shooting this I thought it would be good in black and white. It was taken at 8am on a brilliant sunny morning, yet you'd never know that. 

First Runner Up

Pity there isn't an ant in the photo; there was one visible as I was composing. Maybe it was camera shy.

Image of the Month

I love shooting bees, and trying to get close enough to capture all the detail. It's hard enough to catch them on a flower, and even harder in flight. I've never captured the wings quite like this. There's several other shots of bees in flight that missed the final cut by THAT much.