Making Art from Clunkers

Sometimes, just sometimes, I come up with a photograph that I want to love, that I need to love, but I can’t. Usually, it’s because something went wrong technically with the photo. For instance, I recently captured a Bighorn ram staring straight into the camera with a menacing look. The composition was just what I wanted; the exposure was perfect. But, the depth of field was too shallow; the eyes were in focus, but the rest of the head and body were just a little out of focus, just enough to bother me. My question to myself was what to do with an almost acceptable image.
The initial image looked like this:

An idea came to me when I read my photo club’s monthly newsletter. The club does a monthly theme for their meetings, and the upcoming theme was “Wildlife Abstracts.” I haven’t done a lot with the various artistic filters in Photoshop, but this seemed like the perfect opportunity to do so. After a few tries with different filters, I settled on the Crystallize filter, resulting in this image:

While our first inclination is to make our images as realistic as possible, let’s keep in mind that we can create art based on photos that isn’t photorealistic. Try new things. Try new ways of processing images. See if something new can become part of your stylistic repertoire.