I was planning on submitting these images to the Smithsonian Magazine annual photo contest, but I haven’t been able to. The submit photo page has been giving me an error for the last 5 days from every computer and every network I’ve tried. I figured someone should get to see the work I put in when I was supposed to be grading papers, so here they are:

The White Rocks on the Vermont Long Trail ended up looking a little washed out when I took a picture with my iPhone on a cloudy day. I went for some burn and dodge action to increase the exposure while highlighting the rocks themselves.

The Bighorn Sheep in Banff National Park was pretty hard to see. Although I like the photo the feedback I received was that the sheep himself didn’t “pop.” He definitely pops in the edited version, although I did go overboard.

On this photo of a portion of the Athabasca Falls I went more subtle with the change in exposure, brightening up the colors and the waters a touch while darkening the rocks.

For the jellyfish in the Vancouver Aquarium I removed the light pollution and camera reflections to get a clean black background.

This one was a real challenge and there are definitely some flaws in the editing but I’ll let you find them instead of pointing them out. The baby bison in Yellowstone looked right at me for this photo for the perfect shot with one glaring issue…the road. So I removed the road, using the foreground from the group shot of the baby bison with its herd.

Similarly with this Bison wandering down the road near Old Faithful, I wanted to remove the road to create the illusion of wilderness.

I don’t have the original for this photo taken in Big Bend National Park because I edited it on my phone, but all I really had to do here was crop and increase color saturation.