The past few months have been holiday season and whether you have holidayed in this country or abroad you will probably have taken photographs to remind yourself of the great time you had.  Before you post those images onto Facebook or invite your friends round for a slide show spending a few minutes post processing your images could turn them from holiday snaps into great images.

In this blog I will share with you a few tips on how a little editing can improve your images, all you need is a simple photo editing software application and this can be downloaded free from the Internet or may have been supplied with your camera.

Being a professional photographer means that I can't just take snaps while on holiday, I find myself thinking about each image as though it was for a paying client and that should my friends see the photos I knew that they would expect holiday brochure images.

With every image I was thinking about the composition, lighting and the story I wanted to tell however I was limited in how I could achieve the desired result as I only had my Nikon D200 and two Sigma lenses. No tripod to steady the camera at night and no ND filters to reduce the brightness of the sun.

With all great images it is a combination of skilled camera work and sympathetic post production.  The following image was taken from my hotel balcony early one morning, in the distance the sun was rising over the mountains shining through the early morning mist and in front of me were the roof tops of Marmaris with their solar powered hot water systems catching the suns rays.

This image is 'as taken' and is straight out of the camera and as such appears flat and has no real focus however by adjusting the levels and cropping the photo a huge improvement can be made as shown below.

To start with I cropped the image so that the tree was framing the scene and removed some of the depth to the foreground buildings.  This crop helps the viewer to focus on the interesting shape and form of the roof tops and gives more focus to the mountains in the background.  The next adjustment I made was to increase the contrast of the image, creating a darker foreground and increasing the impact of the clouds. Finaly I tweaked the saturation of the image to give a warmer feel to the image that reflects the feeling I had when I took the photograph.

As you can see, the changes I have made to the photograph are quite subtle but have been effective in improving the aesthetics of the image.

Whilst on holiday I went on a jeep safari into the mountains surrounding Marmaris where we traveled in a convey of open top Land Rovers and Jeeps exploring the local countryside and with this image I was attempting to capture the scale of the convoy by using the drivers wing mirror to capture the vehicals behind us.

Again the above image is 'as taken' and as I only had an 18mm to 50mm lens with me I was not able to zoom into the wing mirror as much as I would have liked.  This resulted in a few areas of the image that distract from my intended outcome.

In order to improve the image I have cropped the dead space from the left of the image and the head of the passenger from the right of the image.  This tighter crop ensures that the viewers focus is now on the wing mirror and on the 'driving' aspect of the trip.

Finally I thought I would share with you two images taken whilst the convoy was harering around the mountains. For these images I wanted to get an image from a position other than my seat.

To get this image I wrapped the camera strap tightly around my wrist and held the camera over the side of the Land Rover and pointed it backwards.  I had the lens on the widest setting in order to capture as much as possible (I was unable to take a peek through the viewfinder due to the cameras location) and the camera on the lowest ISO possible as I wanted to induce as much blur as possible into the motion of the Land Rover behind us as  possible. Unfortunately due to the brightness and my lack of ND filters I ended up with a very fast shutter speed that froze the action.

For this image I used the same technique as the photograph above but with the camera pointing along the side of the Land Rover and held in landscape orientation.  For both this image and the above image I have boosted the saturation very slightly to increase the blue in the sky and the green of the vegetation.

Hopefully now, with a bit of practice, you will be able to add the finishing touches to your holiday snaps.