Urban Woods

CX1, f3.3, 1/270, ISO 80, JPG, 28mm

Took this on my way home today. It is great to have such a versatile camera as the CX1 in the pocket, it gives a lot of flexibility.

Another Shadow

GRD II, f4, 1/500, ISO 80, RAW

Took this again in Greenwich park and liked the form of the shadow. I thought of changing it to b&w but found that the tones of green worked much better.

The Lonely Tree

GRD II, f5, 1/1150, ISO 100, RAW

Ok, probably every photographer has taken at least one picture of a lonely tree, I know I have taken a few. I took this today while walking in Greenwich park.

I posted about this very interesting post from Wouter before and want to post a few new questions here.
The top picture is my post-processed picture and it is how I like this to look but it did take qute a lot of processing work to get it to look like this as you can see from the unprocessed picture at the bottom.
Now, which picture do you prefer? Is the post-processed picture better or do you prefer the original? Does the post-processed picture change the reality in a bad way or is it still close enough to the original scene? How much post-processing should someone do and should we always make it clear that a picture is post-processed? What if you could achieve the same look in camera with scene modes, would it be a post-processed picture?
I find that sometimes I do quite a lot of post-processing to have the picture match my vision or even change my vision after playing around with the picture in post-processing, although I have always a pretty good idea of how it should look like.

I want to tell you also about another very interesting post that I forgot to mention before. Regular reader and fellow blogger Richard has posted a very interesting post about my WOOOW picture here. It's worth a read and I enjoyed reading about his feelings and view towards my picture.

Tree Shadow

GRD, f6.3, 1/500, ISO 100, JPG sepia, 21mm

Today's picture is inspired by some of Wouter's shadow pictures. I took it in Regent's Park with the 21mm lens and modified the blacks and contrast to get the deep shadows.

We had the 2nd unofficial Ricoh meetup today. It is always great to meet people with similar interests, everyone bought their Ricoh cameras for the very same reasons. The main reason is the size and feel/handling of the camera. Having the chance to talk about cameras but also the pictures taken with it was very nice.
We had a chat and some coffee before heading off to do what we do best with the Ricoh cameras, take pictures. The weather was great so we decided to walk to Regent's Park and take some pictures along the way and in the park. After our walk we went for coffee to view the pictures we took and also each nominate a 'Picture of the Day' and we had a small competition to determine the winning picture. Can't wait for the next official Ricoh meet-up.

Caught

GRD, f4, 1/30, ISO 400, JPG

Took this while out for a walk this evening, the red stood out against the grey sky. This picture is not a cut-out but a full color picture where the only tweak was using manual WB in camera and saturating the reds slightly more in post processing. I added some vignetting to draw the focus more to the center of the frame.

Treescape

GX200, f4.4, 1/70, ISo 64, RAW, 72mm

Went for a walk in Richmond park today and saw this tree trunk. I found it fascinating since it looks like a real landscape. Had to think of the movies where people got shrunk to ant size and wondered how this would look and feel like if you are that small.