Happy Sunday! Egidio is hosting this week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge and what a difficult topic – Rejection.

It’s very hard for me to pick photos for this topic because I don’t consider any of my photos to be rejects. I consider them to be “creatively pending” photos, as in I’m waiting for my creativity to kick in to make these photos look better. However, if we are talking about rejected photos, this photo certainly came to mind.

The photo with the gray sky is the edited original while the other photo is one I used Lightroom to change the background. The other problem I have with this photo is that it’s not in focus. I found my heavier zoom lens has a tough time focusing, especially when the sky is so gray and when I’m in a hurry. It’s why I don’t like to go to places with the family. Everyone is always rushing from one place to the next.

I am always seizing the opportunity to photograph wildlife, especially when it’s in the garden. Every year, ever since I started planting plants that attracts pollinators, butterflies, dragonflies, hummingbirds, and a wide variety of small insects like bees and beetles have begun adding my garden as part of their routes. Their presence not only make me feel like I’m doing something right for the environment but it also allowed me the opportunity to practice my wildlife photography.

Unfortunately, without proper camera gear, most of my insect photos have been hits and misses and this photo was one of the misses. As much I would love not to hate on this photo, I found this photo hard to love, especially when the subject is so out of focus.

Finally, yes, I do have a rejection pile and this photo was in there for almost a year before I could think of what to do with this. This is Edinburgh Castle and you want to know something about Edinburgh Castle? It’s very touristy. full of people, and the skies of Scotland is very gray. I was only there for three days and it was gray and misty throughout much of the three days.

Anyway, I tried to using the healing tool as well as the clone stamp tool in Lightroom and Photoshop to remove the people in the photo. I even tried AI when Lightroom introduced it into its software. Nothing really worked. So I ended up cropping quite a bit of the photo like dehazing and color grading and ended up with this result.