Taking pictures on a whim.

ORIGINAL:  Just a quick snap of billowing flags taken on a whim because they looked pretty and I was having a nice day.  I took about 8 pictures, because I wanted to get both flags as unfurled and flat as possible, and also because I knew it would take several shots til I got one I liked.  The resulting picture looked nice, but nothing exciting to look at.  Flags are difficult subjects to shoot as they move constantly and you just have to take a lot of pictures til you get one good one, plus, you do not have a good angle to shoot them since you have to look up and the flags turn out so small.  One way to fix the size of the flags - crop them to enlarge them.

EDITED PICTURE:  The original needed some work to make it somewhat interesting, so I straightened the picture, cropped it so I could have the nice puffy cloud in the frame, and adjusted the ambience and saturation.  It looked much better, but since the blue looked so pretty, I decided to brighten the pic to give it a unique look - who ever sees a sky this color of blue?  The resulting picture looked nice, but lacked something - not sure what.  I know - why does everything have to be in focus?  I fixed this by putting only the flags in focus, and everything else out of focus just enough so that your eyes are drawn to the flags.  A nice finishing touch.

FINISHED MASTERPIECE:  All of the editing created enough grain in the picture to make several loaves of bread (see middle picture) so I took the picture in to Photoshop Express on my beloved iPhone.  I ran it thru Noise Reduction until I removed a lot of the noise, but not so much that it gave the picture a slick look.  So I ended up with a pretty picture I took on a whim of two flags billowing in the breeze, both unfurled at just the right point, straightened, cropped, a puffy white cloud and a beautiful color of blue.  And how was your day?