Lilacs and Barn at Long Hill (Posterized)

Lilacs and Barn at Long Hill (Posterized) Originally uploaded by randubnick

This is an image from a recent walk at Long Hill Gardens in Beverly. The lilacs are beginning to bloom, so I took some pictures. It was a windy afternoon, and the lilac branches were dancing in the wind. I liked the composition in this shot, with the barn in the background. But the foreground was distracting. I adjusted the focus in that area and then used a transparent color overlay, and it looked better. Because I was planning to posterize the image, I also used a color overlay to even out the color in the sky, to avoid getting bands of color that I didn't want. After I posterized the image, I cropped it to get the composition I wanted.