Goals/hopes

A few photographic goals or maybe hopes is a better word choice......one is that black and white portrait of my niece.  She doesn't like it. :) I know because I emailed it to her and she was silent.  The sky one, however, got an immediate, "looove it!" I printed a 4x6 this week of each of the edited portraits and I have to say, I'm not happy with them.  The trail one is still too dark in the eye area and the color is off.  Gotta work on that.  But, the black and white- seriously, I can see why she doesn't like it.  I want to go back to that original file and do the skin touch ups that I did to the sky portrait.  Then, I want to research some technique on how to get the best results from a black and white- like maybe there are certain colors you want to saturate first before switching it over, or a texture to apply, or? Who knows?  That's one goal.  Secondly, not only do I want to check out that river area as I mentioned, but feeling that beckoning to photograph some inspiring objects-- all these grapes around here, ready for harvest! Anyway, I saw some that, ahh!, would be so pretty with early morning light behind them.  Grapes  tightly clustered against some bright green leaves along a bottom row (or maybe it was bright green grapes against dark leaves- can't rememer) so you could really see the shape of the leaves.  So badly I want to capture those on my camera!   Goals, hopes.. but so very little time or opportunity to advance them.  It's ok.  I'm not complaining.  I have been able to do so much this past year- it has all been wonderful.