7. First Week Down, 51 to Go

Footpath in Lennox Forest just north of Glasgow, Lennoxtown, Scotland, UK
photo by Brant Adam
website - https://www.instagram.com/brantadamphotography/
original image - https://www.instagram.com/p/BPu29gYD1YU/
Windows 10 Spotlight version - https://windows10spotlight.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/1a6e1389adac0b89c26c06bac0e0b27c.jpg

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This was a wallpaper served up to me by Windows 10 Spotlight. They don’t give any credit, so I had to dig out the author.

One thing I’ll give to whoever is behind the Spotlight photos - while they often cross the line to kitschy with their photo editing, they just as often bring new life to photos, and this is a good example of the latter. In its original form I would have probably skipped this photo as rather mundane, but somebody there noticed it had potential, and did quite a good job at color design and reframing. Bringing the red leaves into focus was a right thing to do. So I used the Spotlight image (rather than the original photo) as a starting point for my edit. I didn’t do much of anything - just sharpened and brightened the image a bit - it was a tad to dark for my taste, which is unusual. See below.

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5. Scotland Is Green

Old Man of Storr, Isle of Skye, Scotland, UK
photo by Daniel Kordan
website - https://danielkordan.com/
original image - https://danielkordan.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/%D0%A8%D0%BE%D1%82%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B4%D0%B8%D1%8F-7.jpg

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There’ll be more photos by Daniel Kordan (aka Daniel Korzhonov). He’s a photographer worth checking out. His photos are one better than the other, and there’s a lot of them. I don’t always like his image processing though - he’s one of the photographers who will often turn their photos into something that looks more like an illustration, with too sweetened-up, almost tacky colors, but when you compare his take on a subject with the take of the other photographers, he is usually a class above.

There’ll be more photos of Scotland, and the Isle of Skye, as that place looks simply amazing.

I tightened the colors here, and made the whole scene a bit moodier, as I think that does justice to the stormy sky.

Before

After