I usually don't do much post-processing with my photos. For me, the joy in photography is in taking the pictures, not in fussing over them on the computer for hours on end. I sometimes adjust saturation and contrast or experiment with monochrome tones and filters, but that's about the extent of it. Over-processed photos with gimmicky effects always look...well...bad to me.

Today was a rare exception when I decided to play around. In case you haven't guessed by now, my macro lens is my favorite. I have used it enough that I can pretty much point it at something and get the right focus and depth-of-field right away. I'm still getting used to the teleconverter. Sometimes I point the macro lens at something with the teleconverter attached and sway around drunkenly for a bit while I get my orientation back. Today I pointed at an orange poppy and discovered I was quite a bit closer than I had intended to be. As I slowly rocked backward on my heels, the flower petal rising up over the centre of the flower resembled a cresting ocean wave. The orange color made it look like a wave illuminated by a bright orange sun, low on the horizon before sunset. I took the photo, knowing it would end up looking nothing like it had in my imagination. When I uploaded the photos to the computer, I told Graem what I had imagined, and we played around a bit to try to make the petal look like a wave. The result looks absolutely nothing like what I had envisioned. I'm not sure if I like the altered photo, but I decided to post both it and the original anyway.