A bird landed on a telephone wire in my driveway, but only stayed long enough to get one photo. I was hoping to get something more close-up, or clearer, but it was an “art photo” type of shot — so I was happy to get the composition and some raw material to work with.

I wanted the image to be clearly about the bird on the wire, so I zoomed in and cropped away all be the tops of the trees.

I liked this composition too, but it still just looked like a poor quality photo.

Next I tried cropping it off-center into a tall narrow strip.

Not bad for some edge of page art, or to make something like a bookmark.

Next I tried a different cropping and adding dramatic lighting — getting really cheesy!

Next I tried some posterization effects to see if I could get something to pop.

…nope!

Still nope! Neither one did anything for me, but it gave me the idea to posterize and reduce the palette to a few shades of blue.

I cropped out a rectangle with the bird just slightly off center — this was the type of simple “art” I was shooting for. Then reduced it down to square or circle so it could be used for a logo, avatar, or whatever.

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