“Foggy Ebey” was taken from the Ebey’s Prairie overlook near Sunnyside Cemetery during the early morning. The entire prairie was blanketed in fog, and I zoomed in on this farm (the Jenne Farm, I believe) all the way across the prairie.
I manipulated the image to enhance the fog as much as possible. I also removed some of the color and gave it a sepia tone. It has a soft, and old-fashioned look to it and you can almost hear Ma calling the ranch hands in to breakfast.
Images captured under less than ideal conditions can really benefit from enhancement and adjustment in the computer. Early morning and late afternoon offer opportunities to get some amazing shots, and the computer can help your bring out those details that you saw with your eyeballs, but were lost to the camera in shadow.
Digital photography creates a computer file that can be stored in more than one place by simply copying it to a thumb drive, an optical disk (CD, DVD, BluRay), or in the cloud. This is probably very elementary advice, but it took me a couple of months to learn it: Never alter your original image that came from the camera. Always use Save As to give your modified file a different name (I simply add to the filename a code that tells me which application I used to create that file).
Manipulation almost always degrades the image to a certain extent, so having that original file to go back to is a valuable resource.
And you never know what the future will hold. Someday, someone may develop an application that might provide amazing capabilities. If you have your original, unaltered images, that gives you the opportunity to start from ground zero.
The great thing about digital image files is that they are not going to fade over time like prints and negatives are wont to do; nor are you as likely to misplace them. Losing them, however, is the same pain in the patootie as your spouse tossing that shoe box full of priceless negatives by accident.
You need to back up your image files. The more places, the better. This can be a daunting task if you’re an avid photographer. After seven years, I’ve accumulated almost 400 gigabytes of photos (with some video mixed in). Those cloud services that advertise “unlimited storage for $50 a year” choke, spit, sputter, cough, and break wind at the thought of 400 gb of “unlimited” storage.
So I use a couple of external hard drives to back up my images, one of which I try to store somewhere other than my home. I also copy better images to optical disks. Just like people, hard drives fail. Disks get lost, broken, or simply go bad.
If you don’t back up your images, eventually you will lose them. Then you will hate yourself. Save that hate for someone who really deserves it (like politicians) and back up your files.