Mourning gecko on a Christmas light

This week’s Friendly Friday challenge theme is ‘Photo Edits.’ See more responses here. The main photo edits I do are cropping and adjusting color and lighting, and these photos show the path to the final version (above).

My aim was to get a photo of a baby mourning gecko that was hanging onto a Christmas light, mostly for the warmth I suspect. The light was indifferent and I didn’t want to spook the gecko.

The original (bottom photo) is fairly blah with washed-out color and too much distraction around the gecko. In my first fix (below) I cropped the photo to get the focus on the gecko and light. I also did some adjustments to light and color. I like it better, but it still wasn’t working for me, so I set the photo aside.

When this challenge came up, I thought of this photo and had another go. I cropped the photo tighter still to fill the frame. Then I worked on the color and lighting. The result is an image with more ‘pop,’ much closer to what I was looking for. That’s a Christmas light and a thumbtack holding the wire in place, so these are little things, including the baby gecko, but they jump out of the photo. Also, the various lighting effects surrounding the Christmas light come to the fore, which I like.

Ironically, the first photo I thought of for this challenge was a fish, which I thought I must have cropped quite a bit to get the final image, but when I checked the original image I found I’d done virtually nothing to it. I’m posting that photo tomorrow in response to the next Sunday Stills challenge.

Also posted in response to this week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #66: Filling the Frame.

9 thoughts on “Mourning gecko on a Christmas light”

  1. pattimoed

    Hi, Graham. Thanks for joining us! I think your second pass at this shot brings the gecko into sharper focus. The crop and saturation really work here too. I’ve never seen a gecko on a Christmas light before!

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