A Barn, A Sunset, and a Windmill

Photo of the Day

When I first picked photography back up in 2011 I had an easy formula for what I did. I would take my camera out to the windmills at sunset and try and place something interesting in the picture as well. If you read my site back then you would know that more often than not a barn would appear in the frame somewhere. To me this is a winning formula still although I don’t get out to the windmills as much as I would like now. Part of that is that during the photo 365 project I did I found ways to see the beauty everywhere instead of just one location a few miles away. I didn’t need a formula anymore, just my camera. Later this week though I might just have to revisit the windmills one more time.

Technical Data

This was the first picture that I edited in Lightroom. At the time I just thought of it as a way to convert RAW files. A shot like this would have been a badly done HDR at the time, but the windmills movement killed the picture for me. This Lightroom program really took one RAW image and made it look very nice to me. The ability to make nice images in dynamic situations with one RAW file really turned things around for me. The only reason this image never made it to the blog is the fact that I placed a huge watermark on the file. I will get into that more below.

Why I Quit Watermarking Images

As I said above this photo used to have a large nasty watermark on it. I really thought that it was protecting me. After a while though I decided that watermarking was a foolish endeavor. When I decided to post this image today I took the photo into Photoshop, and ran the content aware brush over the watermark. It was gone immediately without a trace of anything in its place. If I can do that to the jpg of a picture just imagine what someone who actually knows how to use Photoshop can do to it. The ease of getting rid of the watermarks helped me quit them.

I do still watermark images that I put on Facebook, but that is more of an advertisement than protection. With certain images I want people to know where to go to find more. When you are looking at an image here though you have already arrived so why put nasty writing in the middle of a gorgeous scene?