Yesterday I went with my camera club up to a ridge line in the east bay hills for a sunset. I have never been to this particular location, and I was really excited to find a new place for sunset photos. Here I’m including two images…the first was looking east at the pink sky toward Mt. Diablo and the other was looking through to the west at the orange sky. I took some liberties here with processing them. I can’t help myself!
So the other day I was chatting with my chiropractor and he asked me if I could take one of his images and redo it. Well, you know me right? I couldn’t wait to take a crack at it and I didn’t want to hold back. Do I ever??? He didn’t want me to give credit here so I am posting his “before” image with his blessing. The “after” (my rework) is below it.
A couple of things I’m trying to notice more is light. I loved the structure of the barn and the birds on the original image, but it just didn’t have much light so I created through Nik Color Efex.
I also didn’t think it had much interest regarding the sky so I did a quick fix and selected the barn, inverted the selection, masked it out and dropped a sky and a tree in. The sky is actually from one of my own images which includes the hills to the right side of the barn and I obtained the tree from a site that has royalty free images, so I blended them together into the background.
I also love textures of barns, so I “tried” to bring that out more by some sharpening techniques. Lastly, I applied a texture and colorized the entire image so it felt cohesive. Enjoy the blast of color!
A professional photographer once told me that a perfectly balanced picture is nice but it’s merely a “record” of what happened and is not necessarily artistic nor shows individuality. Now some of you may disagree with that statement and I’m sorry if I made you cringe lol, but that statement has always struck me.
A very crisp picture can be stunning as they are, however, what did I see there really? Trying to go a bit deeper with my editing process allows me to bring out the emotion I felt when I took the picture. I think I’ve mentioned this before but I guess I’m trying to reinforce it in my own mind so I think it’s worth saying again.
Here I’ve revamped the original seagull shot which was a decent shot to begin with, but how many gulls on a rock have we seen? I know I’ve seen a million of them. But what did I REALLY see….I saw a lone gull on a rock that was visited many times before him. His bright orange beak and his pinkish feet stood out to me when I saw him standing there. I thought about how the life of a seagull might be difficult out in the ocean which then drove me to make the ocean darker and more foreboding, and it also added contrast to the seagull’s white body. His pose also felt like it was “just for me” as he nonchalantly stood there waiting for me to snap the photo. I chose to use a painterly effect because I’m rather enjoying those lately as you probably can tell. 😉
It also helped that this post is about being unique and that the gull was alone on the rock, hence the title “Individuality”. Kind of sums up the post in a way, eh?
Laura Macky Photography 