Wolfe's Neck Woods - Two Versions

Despite all my reading about photography, especially digital photography, there is still so much I don't know.  I got my first digital camera back in 2001, a Canon G1, which at the time was pretty much the state of the art for an advanced "point and shoot" camera.  It was highly regarded then and the most recent iteration, the Canon G12 is still well reviewed.  In the intervening years I purchased a Nikon D60 for my wife, and most recently a Nikon D90 for myself.  So in the grand scheme of things, I consider myself a novice in the world of digital photography.  I'm even more of a novice when it comes to sharing my pictures via blogging, Facebook, or any of the other many services one can find on the internet.  

I use a MacBook Pro to download my images, and Apple's Aperture to keep them all organized and to do some post processing.  I also occasionally use Photoshop Elements or Nikon's Capture NX2 for some advance photo editing.  With all these options, I'm still trying to find the best "workflow" to post my images online.  I know I can ask others, and I'm sure I would get dozens of different opinions on what works best.  The scientist part of me says, just do the experiment and see what looks the best.  In this case, the two images above are the same image, first adjusted in Aperture.

The top image was further processed with the Aperture plugin BorderFX, which only added the border, any maybe some additional sharpening, although I'm not entirely sure of that.  I'm not sure if I like adding the border or not to the pictures I post here.  The border does seem to add to the picture, but would take away from the simple, minimalist style of the blog.  I'm still trying to decide on which way I would like to go here.  The only thing I really know is that pictures on other blogs look a lot better than my images.  In most cases, I'm sure they are much stronger images to begin with.  Afterall, most of the blogs I follow are done by real photographers.  Even my better images might suffer from a lack of good post processing skills and/or a good workflow for properly presenting them on the web.  Hence, the reason for this post.   Thanks for looking and if you have any comments on which you like, I'd be happy to hear them.  I'll be tweaking this blog for some time to come.

Finally, I just want to say that my thoughts and prayers go out to all those affected here in Connecticut by last weekend's snow storm.  There was extensive damage, and there are many without power.