Just Another Gratuitous Animal Photo

I have a friend who just got a new addition to her 'family'. This little girl was born a few weeks ago, and I finally got out there to take some shots. When you take pictures of something alive, in a large pasture, and with a wide angle lens.. well, it is easiest just to start firing off shots and see what you have when you are done. Little baby horses just don't pose very well. LOL!

A bunch of the shots came out great, and my friend was thrilled with them. I had one shot that I just loved..... except it wasn't one of the better shots. This photo had a few problems. It had a lens flair, it was a little washed out, and I didn't care for the composition (lots of pasture, tiny horse)... BUT, the little foal was leaping in the air so joyfully and I had caught her with all four feet off the ground! My friend commented that several others in the series of shots were great, but I liked that one, go figure! Here is what came out of the camera 'raw'

For anyone interested, here's what I did to get from the original to the finished product. I'm Learning! First I cloned out the lens flair, then I cropped the picture down using the rule of 3rds to give the shot some interest, and then I added just a little rotation before hitting the ok to crop button. Then I adjusted the washed out problem using levels. Now I had the little guy looking like I wanted... but the background was a little distracting. Hmmm.. selecting the foal, inversing the selection with a nice feather and adding a slight Gaussian blur took care of that. Since the picture now looked like something I might want to frame, I decided to add some 'strokes' around the picture (and a touch of beveling) to simulate matting it. I chose black for the outer mat, then two colors of green which I chose by using thepicker to get the colors from the picture itself. Almost done! I then added a 'frame' from my effects folder to go around my mats... and VIOLA!

What do you think??

For anyone interested, the little girl is a Fjord. They are really cool horses. They look and act much like draft horses, but are small, almost pony sized. Here is a link to a page with info if you are interested!