Last week, while writing my Blog, I noticed a change in the light coming through the window in my office. I turned my head and noticed fog settling in. It was late in the afternoon, and I had roughly two hours to spare before it was time to eat, so I quickly changed my clothes to something more appropriate for cooler temperatures and headed out. My destination was the Provincial Park thirty eight kilometers (twenty three and a half miles) away, where I hoped to capture some images of a tree I call “The Sentinel” with a foggy background. Alas, like so many times before, the fog seemed to be everywhere else except where I was.
I spent some time scouting around the area, looking for various angles for future compositions and then headed for home. Passing through Mira Gut, where the Mira River meets the North Atlantic, I noticed someone had been clearing around the shoreline between the ocean and the pavement, presumably to improve the view from the house across the road. Carefully selected Spruce and Birch trees stood both singly and in clusters that offered a few nice images that I can only imagine would be lovely from the windows at the front of the house. Not wanting to linger long enough to draw attention to myself, or to be late for supper, I captured a few photos and proceeded home to eat before finishing my Blog.
It was the next day that I sat down to review the photographs I had taken, and decide how to process them. Due to the overcast sky and the nondescript colours, I immediately chose to convert them to monochrome; that almost went without saying.
After converting the images to monochrome, I began looking with a more critical eye, choosing to edit the hues within the Monochrome spectrum. Much of that is a matter of personal preference, and there are no hard and fast rules regarding what is “right” or “wrong.” Once I was satisfied with the “shades of grey,” I looked at ways to Crop the images to make them more pleasing to the eye. While I often see the merit in the “rule of thirds,” I sometimes choose to edit in other ways, however, I decided to stay with the tried and true for one image. I placed the tree trunk on the right side of the grid and cropped out a large portion of the foreground, leaving only the sky and a bit of the sea as background.
I looked at it, reviewed it, and looked at it again for a day or two, really unimpressed with the outcome. Blah, blah, blah! It was a tree!
But then an idea struck; reverse the colours, like an old-fashioned negative that always came with the prints from the developer. I clicked the “reverse” button and suddenly I had an abstract image that was more Art than Photograph. It stood out more and made the image more bold, less Blah…
While I, like many Photographers, make every attempt to get it right in camera, sometimes an image is not really done without a little editing. That is why I have several Gigabytes of images saved; one can never be sure if a Photo has been given every opportunity to reach its full potential right away. Sometimes it takes some time away and fresh eyes to see all the possibilities. Sometimes a broad landscape gets new life if a portion is singled out. Of course, if the image is shot in a low resolution, cropping too much will do more harm than good. That’s why I always shoot in Hi-Res JPEG as well as RAW. Before editing, I make copies and edit the copies, thereby leaving the originals unchanged. That way, if my editing doesn’t turn out the way I hope, the original image is still there to try again.
Yes, it’s time consuming, and time is always precious, but if you invest the time in capturing the image, it’s worth investing the time in making that image as wonderful as it can be.
Thank you for taking the time to read this. As always, I appreciate your thoughts and comments; just click the “contact” button to send me an e-mail. Until next week, keep your shutter finger warm and always remember to pack extra batteries!
