2020: After months of working from home, and working around my home on home improvement projects; cancelling plans for trips to Acadia National Park and Cape Cod, we had the opportunity to spend a week in early September in Chincoteague Island, Virginia. Mostly, we avoided people.
Unfortunately we could not escape the mosquitos. We went out to the lighthouse one evening just at dusk, and as soon as we left the car, skeeters were swarming us. I had put some good goop on and thought I was okay. When this quick photo was done and we escaped back to the parking lot, and got back to our lodging, I learned things: I missed my elbows. I missed a spot on my cheek. And assuming a t-shirt would protect my back was a very, very bad idea. Across my shoulders my back was one big whelp, swollen from mosquito bites. (Luckily, I don’t have bad reactions so a day or so later it was all good).
I used DXO Photolab to do a basic cleanup of the photo, then ran it through Denoise AI. It’s good enough, I suppose, but since I now have access to Topaz Studio 2 and its art features, I “painted” the photo a bit. This is not stellar art, but I found it fun and interesting.
Modified Van Gogh effect, straightened and cropped slightly.
JPG produced from RAW and run through Denoise.
