Cool Cactus Photo Art Gifts

Most of my flower photos are taken right at the plant, bush, or tree. I frequently take my camera on different "inspiration walks" where I go to a different area and go down every street looking for flowers, plants, etc. really anything interesting and then I try to get as many different photos as possible from different angles because it is difficult to get good shots in the street due to uncontrolled lighting, obstacles, and cluttered backgrounds. It is still worth it because street flowers are often much larger and healthier blooms than cut flowers. I have on occasion bought flowers and plants to photograph at home. In this case I have good control of light, but the flower quality is lacking.

While I know many people just directly upload images for sale that is not what I do.

First after finishing a photo shoot, I copy the images to a new directory on my hard drive and then I do a first pass through them. I delete the ones that are blurry, have bad lighting and other strong defects. Then I look at the similar images and keep the best. Out of the remainder I fix the contrast, color balance and make my final selection.

Even then I'm not ready to upload. I erase any artifacts or crop out what doesn't belong, check saturation, scan the image for tiny artifacts, and then apply effects as desired. If and when I'm happy with the image I upload it to Zazzle, Imagekind, and Redbubble for viewing and possible sale.

It takes me on average about one hour of editing to prepare a photo. This is after taking the photo. It depends more on the level of detail than the number of effects.

I take my photos with a 10.1 Megapixel Casio Exilim. It is a pretty good camera, but it is not pro. I've had it since spring 2008. It does well with daylight, shade and indoors during the day. It isn't good at night and it can't take any true macro photos only close up shots. If I try to get too close everything goes blurry (yes, in macro mode) I use Adobe Photoshop to edit my Photos.