When I set up a shot, I’m usually looking to capture what my eye sees and I try to carry over that idea in post production. Overly edited photos, what I’ve started calling Unicorn Editing (how is that sky neon green, or those mountains blue…is there a unicorn somewhere in this shot? Or a hobbit? Gnome? The Adirondacks do not have anything in common with the Barbie set and should not be hot pink) is not appealing to me, so I try to keep things looking pretty realistic.

Sometimes when I see the shot in a larger format on a monitor I’m blown away by what’s there and what I didn’t notice when standing in front of the lake or on top of the hill. Like the difference between the color of the sky and the reflection of the sky in the above photo. No changes were made to enhance those blues. The only color editing was with the bits of yellow on the few trees that still had leaves. I love how the mirror image on the bottom seems sharper than at the top, how jagged the evergreens look in the water and how the puffy clouds float. I love that I’m learning to freeze an exact moment and then to be awed by what the lens reveals later.