A coworker was stopping by to talk about some storage matters and noticed my PC background – he mentioned it looked awfully cold and wintry.  So last night I set about trying to find something green to use.  The willow tree in our backyard had some greenness to it, so here are a couple pictures of it.

Picture 1

Picture 2

The nice weather really let me play around with my camera settings – I goofed with exposure time, f-stop and ISO speeds.  Taking pictures of stuff up close proved to be challenging with the auto focus, so I had to tweak what part of the frame I wanted it to grab.  After spending about five minutes trying to figure out how to manually focus the lens I gave up.  Ideally, I wanted the picture to not be too bright but for the green to pop out a bit.  Picture 2 ended up being closer to what I wanted, color wise, but I preferred the layout of Picture 1.  Paint.net came to the rescue (I’ve never really messed with picture alteration before) I simply dialed down the brightness and ticked up the contrast and came out with this.

Picture 1, modified

In with the green, out with the snow!  🙂

–Nat