Apparently I am in a darker mood than I was in the recent past — but not too dark! I decided to tackle another photo I have had collecting dust in my WordPress media library, and I ran into the same processing adventure with this shot as I did previously with a jumping spider photo. As before, I ended up with three variants: too light, then too dark, then just right — well, just good enough anyway. (And incidentally, the bright and medium shots are fairly subtle in difference.) The shot comes from an interesting natural scene at the beginning of last spring: stoneflies collected in great numbers in pairs and singles on very old, mostly forgotten headstones. The typically languid, clumsy stoneflies were very busy at the time, so they weren’t posing much. It threw off my focus a bit — I missed the eyes — and as usual the vertical, flat surface made getting an angle difficult. It was a nice add to the collection though; I hadn’t captured a stonefly nuptial.
Like some versions of Goldilocks, I left the house (i.e. GIMP) of the Three Photographs running, but before I bolted I messed around with some of the filters. I guess we could call it a stab at digital “art,” but I’ll just call it a little fun after fussing about fine differences in color and light.
The above image “art-ified” in the GIMP with the “Emboss” filter.
BugPhoto.net 
Always worthwhile experimenting, even if you never do quite the same thing again!