About the Image(s)

For this month I was inspired by all the bnw photos I saw from the group over the past year and decided to try my hand at making a bnw photo from a old photo I took using my camera of cherry blossoms in Central Park. The photo was taken in April 2025 and was taken around 10 am. The day was cloudy and I was just starting to experiment with my camera. The original photo was never submitted to the group because I thought the lighting was too harsh but I decided to experiment in bnw to see if it could help draw out the flowers. After that I cropped the photo to focus on the central flowers in the photo and then went a little overboard on the AI remove feature in adobe and removed three flowers, one onthe left side, one on the right side and one onthe top of the photo. I then adjusted the contrast, highlights, exposure, shadows, whites and blacks in the lightroom options until I could draw out the flowers. I then applied a lens blur to help remove part of the background and applied a mask on the sky next to the right side of the top flower to remove a hot spot in the photo. When taking the image I used the camera's autofocus. As a side question, I am looking at nd filter for my camera (I have no knowledge of how they really work) and was wondering if that would have helped with some of the bright spots in the photo?