If anyone has been following me recently, you know that I am now diving deeply into high profile black and white imagery. I am loving it, I find the absence of colour refreshing. Re-imagining reality.
Atmosphere and Grain
This is an image I made some time ago and it lived on my hard drive for a long time. I didn’t see an image in it. Then with some attitude change I began to see something in it but it needed work. I used to restrict myself to conventional aspect ratios for a long time but I’m learning how to let that go and just use what looks best for the photo. I also added the grain on purpose, and I”m loving it!
Autumn Mood
Photo of the Week # 210
This image of “The Storm” was posted here before but this one is different. I have made several different versions because I’ve never got one that I really like before. I’m known for re-editing images as tech advances but in this case, I just never got it right before. I like realistic looking images and this one is very easy to edit too aggressively. I sat down the other day and actually decided that the sky needed to be pulled back considerabky to bring it to the point of looking “real”. I see that a lot, I think many people tend to over process skies, trying to bring out more mood. Darkness is often exaggerated, as is sunset colours. I second guess myself a lot as I don’t want to fall into that category but I know I do from time to time. This will hopefully be the final version of “The Storm”, it looks more accurate to the way I saw it now and I am liking it. Hope you do too.
Is Aspect Ratio Important?
For a long time when I started processing photographs I was reluctant to alter the aspect ratio of an image. My reasoning was to do with printing and framing rather than composition. I figured that there were all these standard sizes of frames available and you had to stay within those dimensions. Granted, custom framing and matt cutting is an added expense, but not every photograph fits the norm. We want our photograph to be displayed in it’s best form so I began to re-think my practices.
The image below has all of it’s information grouped together in a strip that was on the bottom of the frame while the sky was full of nothing but heavy fog. In this case, there was no reason to leave the sky there. In this case, changing the aspect ratio to a more panoramic crop made more sense. The rule of thumb for composition is if it isn’t helping the image, it is hurting it so the boring sky had to go.
Peaceful Morning