Marina and I are now in Arcata California spending some time
with my friend Tyler before continuing to travel south. Next stop should be
somewhere in the trinity alps or the Lost Coast, either will be an adventure,
but the choice may be weather dependent.
While we are here in Arcata, we are both trying to work
through the images that we have been working on. Catching up on ‘work’ and trying to increase
our output.
In this post I want to walk through a few variations of the
same photograph that I took at Sister rock earlier this week. The first image I edited on the road, the
second 2 were made on another computer while taking more time and thinking
about my creative choices more.
The first image was edited in my car while I worked on my
laptop. I was able to remove the dust spots,
add some contrast back (way to much contrast) and crop and straighten the
horizon line. I posted this image online
the other day, and while I do like the frame, I can see now that the
adjustments came across to heavy handed, you can see too much blue and far too
much contrast. Some of the blacks are clogged up and detail is lost in the
image.
The root of these editing choices may come from working on a
monitor that is not color calibrated in any way. This will then affect the way people read
this image when they view the photograph.
Today I went back to the raw images that I have from this
shoot and selected another frame. I reworked this image to create something
that was a little more color balanced. In the end I like this image more, there is a
more ‘real’ color to the scene, though reality is rarely what I want to
communicate in a photo. But it looks a little less affected.
The last rendition of this photograph was converted into
black and white. This allows the eye to
focus on the lines and less on the color of the scene. I have been on a black and white kick recently. This image is a straight black and white image, it has no split tone. Each image is different and my ‘favorite’ image might not matter. What this post shows is 3 different renderings of the same scene and how that affect the way we read the image.
