Happy Sunday! Anne-Christine from Leya is the host for this week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge and she is starting a new series in which she will be looking back at a previous Lens-Artists Challenge theme. For the inaugural challenge, she is looking back at challenge #42 with the theme of Creativity.

Although I did not officially until the end of 2020, I participated in a few of the challenges in 2018 and 2019. I didn’t participate in this particular challenge, so this will be my first take on this particular theme.

I saw this composition in my head before my aunt pointed it out to me. Immediately, I could feel my imagination churning. What does this look like? Mmm…

“Doesn’t that look like the head of a frog?” My aunt asked.

What do you know? It sure did look like a frog.

Now, looking at this picture, I feel like this looks more like the head of a deer, with the branches on top as antlers. I saw this tree when I went to the Tulips Festival in April. There were several others like this but I happened to like this one best.

I do wonder how this was made.

I wonder if it involves wrapping the tree in a certain way. I’ve watched plenty of tree surgeries on YouTube. All I can say is they are too elaborate for me to attempt. So I’ll leave it to your imagination to how this was done but I thought it was quite a creative thing to had done on a tree.

I saw this composition as an art piece before I took this photo in Suizenji, which is a park located in Kumamoto, Japan. After traveling to Japan twice in the last 2 years, I’ve noticed that Japan has some of the calmest water I’ve ever seen.

Anyway, my photo was only supposed to contain the koi fishes but as I was just about to take the photo, this duck or mallard or goose (can’t tell) came sauntering up. Too late, I tapped the shutter button on my phone. So much for a negative space oriented photo.

Just as I was about to take another one, I was rudely pushed aside by this little boy. “Baka!” He called me, meaning stupid in Japanese, and started tossing fish food into the water. Suddenly, the pond was swarming with fishes.

So much for my shot! Also, that had to be the rudest person I’ve ever encountered in Japan.

I hope this doesn’t look like just an ordinary photo of rainbow because it isn’t just an ordinary photo of a rainbow. It was a crappy picture of a rainbow and I somehow turned it into an art piece. I can’t recall how I made this picture. All I know is it took me a long time to edit it in Lightroom as I played with the various switches and toggles and voila, I arrived at this picture.

Lastly, I did not like this photo when I first saw it. It did not reflect the scene I saw in my head. Even after I turned it into a black and white, it still wasn’t how I imagined it. In my head, I saw the people being these cut out shapes against an almost stark white background. I tried and tried in Lightroom but this was as best as I could make it. It’s still one of my all-time favorite black and white, just not what I’ve imagined.