In the course of taking your images, you are sure to generate a fair number of clunkers. Our common practice when later reviewing the results of a shoot on the computer is to delete all the ones with technical or other issues without giving it a second thought.
Here’s an unretouched/uncropped example of an image I should have deleted. It was taken with a non-DSLR long-zoom Nikon Coolpix camera from the Santa Monica Pier in CA, the auto focus struggling to do its thing at the max end of its focal length (26x) and the strong ocean wind blowing me around (making composition difficult). Yuk:
For some reason I decided to open this image in PostworkShop and see what would happen. PostworkShop offers a ton of different artwork filters, and after some experimentation, I got this result:
Wow! An image that should never have seen the light of day became some sort of post-apocalyptic/environmental awareness statement. So in this case I’m really glad I kept the worthless original.
Consider what you can do with your unintentionally out-of-focus images (use for backgrounds in Photoshop composites?) or even blurred ones. Any image, good or not, can be used as a texture overlay as well.
Read more about my power plant outtake image and the post-processing process I used (with alternate results) in issue #21 of my free ezine.
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Now that’s cool Mike, I sometimes do the same thing …… amazing things can come from mistakes in digital work.
Thanks for doing this site……………ss
You’re welcome Stan, thanks for checking it out!