Which do you prefer?

The monochrome image is obviously the edited version, with contrast and brightness adjustments but the other is the natural image with no adjustments made. The high contrast between the light and shadows made it a good choice to convert to black and white.

Birmingham Canal in October

I have upgraded my compact camera to a DSLR and am still getting to grips with it (Nikon D3000) but one of the main reasons I wanted one was for the shallow depth of field effect which I love and can't seem to create on my old camera. The black and white photo simply had the contrast and brightness adjusted on windows viewer, no photoshop experiments just yet!

Flash or no flash?

25/09/11 Birmingham Botanical Gardens Part II

Choosing the landscape mode automatically enhances the blues and greens (see first two images). This can also be achieved by selecting the 'vibrant' colour filter. The water feature was captured in sports mode.

24/09/11 Birmingham Botanical Gardens

I used the macro mode on my Panasonic Lumix compact camera to get the detail of this branch whilst giving a blurred background.

Pooch

Unfortunately I did not save the original image of this photo, though all I did was crop the picture as previously there were some wilting petals on the right. My macro mode on my Panasonic Lumix FS5 with a cheap version (from Amazon) of the Gorilla Tripod allowed me to get great detail on the petals of this flower. It did need cropping, as the detail showed the wilting edges which took the elegance away from the shot.