Edit This June 2020 - An Evening Walk Along The Creek

I always enjoy the "Edit This" contests Fine Art America occasionally has where they provide a photo and ask us to edit it to make it our own piece of art. They do want the original photo to be recognized in some way. They then have a contest and vote for the best design.

They provided a photo taken along a river in Manchester England with a German Shepard dog walking along the dirt path on a beautiful late spring season day. For my editing this time, I edited the image in both Affinity Photo and Lightroom.

The sky was already pretty but I wanted to make it different. So I created a sunburst over the trees and changed the overall image to a warmer tone to make it feel more evening like. Then I removed the branches on the top right, the dogs harness, and widened the river to get read of some of the dirt embankment.

The photo was looking good but it needed a little more, so I added the boat and a photo of a boy fishing from two other photos of my own. Then I realized I needed to change up some of the shadows of the dog and the big tree down the pathway since I changed the position of the light. Light is always one of the most important factors in a photo, and when you're changing and editing a photo, you have to keep that in mind if you change the lights direction. Just helps it look more natural like.

Still feeling like it needed something else I added the Bald Eagle from one of my photos and then took the image into Lightroom where I did my final edits. I did some light painting, fine tuning on colors and clarity, added tags, a description and it was finally done. It took me probably 2 hours to create it. Some of the time involved looking through photos and trying to come up with ideas. These contest are always a challenge which makes it fun and helps me to learn more as I go.

Since I won 3 contests ago, I'm not able to win for the next 2 contests, but I can still enter them and people can still vote. I ended up tying for 4th place for this one which I consider a great honor!

Here's the link to the photo: https://5-jennifer-white.pixels.com/featured/an-evening-walk-along-the-creek-jennifer-white.html
Here's the contest link: https://fineartamerica.com/contests/edit-this-june-2020.html?tab=leaderboard