Flowers behind bars

Since I was a little kid, I have been notorious for taking up projects and quickly losing interest in them! I am happy to report that my so called "passion" for photography has survived for the past few years. "Macro" is my thing... I long for the day when I will be happy enough with a picture I take to frame it and put it up on my wall. Call it high standard or low self-esteem, until now I've always found something lacking in most pictures I take. But thankfully, that has not weaned my enthusiasm for taking pictures.

When I set out for school today, the day was cloudy & I almost left my camera home! But look what I would have missed! I call this - flowers behind bars...

Digital enhancement

I have always been a little resistant to digitally enhancing a picture (although I've tried it for my first post). For example, most of the photo editing softwares enable users to change color, contrast & tuning of pictures along with giving special effects such as Sepia or soft focus or saturation among others. Looks like a lot of people make use of these features after they take pictures. But I always feel like I'd be cheating if I did that... But then, I take pictures with a digital camera anyway, isn't that cheating too? Most serious photographers too use different kinds of filters et al on their cameras. So which side should I be on?
Here's a picture that I did some "work" on. The first one is the original copy and on the second one I enhanced some shadows and increased saturation. Which one do you think is a better picture? The original but not so good looking one or the one that saw some cosmetic
enhancements?

World view

I took this picture during our Cape Cod trip last summer. Thank god for digital cameras (!) 'cause I took so many pictures that day that I would have spent a fortune on film. Some wise man (or a woman - the feminist in me exclaimed) has aptly said "when you take 50 shots you'll probably get one that is brilliant"... I found that to be true in this trip. The total number of pictures I took that day go into 100s, but there are only a few pictures that I actually like. So, coming to the point, this is one of those pictures that I really like.

We were inside one of the lighthouses and looking out through the viewing windows. I took pictures thro' most of the available windows, but many of them were looking into parking lots or roads and the composition of the picture was not good enough. But here, I found the right amount of light and shadow and tried to make use of the inside-outside point of view.