If I’d been more on top of things, I could have posted this the day I took it, which was Saturday, and thus only been a day later than the equinox and slightly more, I dunno, appropriate? Timely? Whatever, this is a nice illustration of spring, better than I originally believed, even. I think it’s fairly obvious how narrow a field of view this is, capturing a tiny section of a shallow pond, and I was focusing on the minnows over the leaf. However, I count eleven separate critters or portions thereof present in the frame. If you get more than that, let me know, and I’ll give you a prize of some kind once our independent judges have confirmed the count.
Aw, what the hell, here’s another, a pond slider showing off those fabulous nails. I did a tweak in the curves function in Photoshop to bring out the stripes on the head and hind a little better, rendering it slightly less of a silhouette. This is a tighter crop than the original, and it’s interesting the difference it can make – there were no more reeds visible in the wider version, but additional open water in the lower corners, so this crop makes it seem more as if I was spotting the turtle through a gap in a thicket of weeds than the original does. I think our minds, knowing how plants grow, automatically fill in the lower sections outside of the frame with the reeds that must be there. And until I saw the effect for myself, I never would have imagined it working that way, so playing around with exactly how and where you crop an image might bring out a different perspective and impression. Experiment freely.