Photo learning

I have been trying to learn a little bit about processing and enhancing the pictures I take. Even though I try very hard to get things right in the camera, I've been wanting to expand my skills to include some photoshoppery. I promise to do my best not to end up on this website (so funny!). So after some reading on the web and some discussion in a Flickr forum, I spent some time on a picture today.

As background to this image, today was a gross day. Blustery doesn't begin to describe it. While we didn't get the quantity of snow we had heard about the wind was crazy. I have been wanting to shoot something (ANYTHING) outside so I went for a walk regardless at a little conservation area just outside of town and while I wasn't cold, I cut my walk short on account of the trees falling due to the wind (saw one topple and heard about 5 or 6 more) and I had to pick up my son from school.

Click on any of the pictures to be taken directly to my Flickr site with larger (and even full size) versions. These are best viewed larger in my opinion (but I may just be trying to get more hits on my Flickr site, how are you to know?)

The first picture is straight out of the camera.

This second one is what I normally would do to the picture.

And this third one is kind of over the top. Complete with border and my silly little watermark that I'm not sure I even like, but there it is.

For those who want to know, for this last one I started with picture 2 as background, did a "burn overlay layer" "gaussian blur overlay layer" and a selective burn layer finished up with the fuzzy border bit in the GIMP and added a 2 layer version of my silly little watermark (gaussian blurred black version as shadow under the slightly transparent white version)
All done in the GIMP 'cuz I have no money for Photoshop CS3 or even Lightroom (although I'm trying the beta, it's cool but my laptop doesn't quite meet the specs to run it well, but if you have a second monitor and Lightroom 2 beta - wow that's cool!)