The first image of the set. An image that I would never have taken digitally, but due to my inexperience, this oddly composed image has become a favorite of mine. It feels somewhat Wes Andersonesque, so I followed that path to where it led me. I warmed it up a bit, and I took control over the varying blue hues by bringing the cyan and blue hues closer to each other and dramatically decreasing their saturation. I almost wanted the landscape to follow the color palette of the man’s outfit. Very neutral, very calm. I took away overall contrast so the background didn’t get too much attention, but added some back by lifting the mids and dropping the blacks to help the man keep our attention.
I never know how the rest of the world feels about images like these. For me this one is nice, but I wonder what everyone else pictures. I like that the painting environment helps the photo itself feel more like a painting. The brush strokes on the wall, and the fact that I shot this through a window make it feel a little soft and surreal. The original image could have been left alone, but I wanted to enhance that painting look a little further. I warmed this one up as well, lifted the mids quite a bit, and I decided to crop in so I could straighten things up. My composition was a little off on this one.
This image is all about that lamppost shadow for me. Without it, I’d still like it, but for some reason, that shadow makes me happy. Photo number three and we’re still warming things up. Let’s see how long that goes on for. I had to play around quite a bit with the highlight to exposure relationship, but I like where it ended up. The shadows are still clear and defined, not sucked up by the light, but there’s enough light on the street and building to make sure you can see there’s a light. Sometimes messing around too much will leave you with an image so flat it can look overcast. I knew I’d want the blue of the sky to be toned down, but I didn’t have to do much. I took down the cyan a bit and lightened up the blue, and that was that.
I took this one over the counter in the post office in Falmouth. The red on the right is a photo booth curtain. I didn’t expect this to turn out whatsoever, so I’m happy it ended up being a favorite. Another point for film, I suppose. Essentially, I wanted the red to pop and the blue to fall back. Compared to the original, it looks like the blue is completely gone. There’s still some there, but barely. Guess what, I warmed this one up as well, but that was clearly necessary. The post office was full of fluorescent lights. I played around with the red for a while, tweaking it slightly back and forth between orange and magenta, finally landing on that classic red in the photo.
Green, you say? Yeah, this one looks wild next to the original, but as I’ve said before, it’s important to not compare too closely to your original. Sure, use it as a guide to see how far you’ve strayed, but don’t let it stop you from changing what you feel needs to be changed. Anyway, this image is a great example of when not to sharpen, clarify, or add too much contrast. The grass and those “twiggy” trees are begging to look crunchy, so I tried really hard to stay away from that. I dramatically lowered the contrast, lifted the shadows a bit, and brought my maximum white level down to even things out. The white balance ended up warmer and closer to green to give it a “woodland” sort of vibe. I also lightened up the greens and brought the blues down considerably.
Another photo that I’m not sure anyone but myself would like, and another photo that I warmed up. This one was all about the contrast. I brought it down, and I lifted the shadows and blacks. I was left with a very flat image, so I messed with the tone curve to bring the deep dark blacks (what are these descriptors?) down. I also brought the blues of the wall together, shifting them closer to a very light teal, almost green. There’s not much else to say about this one.
This image is definitely one I’d take digitally. It feels right up my alley. I was actually surprised when I finally saw this one because I remember spending an uncomfortable amount of time framing it up. Time wasted apparently because it’s way off. I wanted this one to be perfect, so I cropped in and used the guided perspective correction tool to line it up. Other than that, you can see I lightened things up and gathered all the colors together to play nicely together. The cyans were destroyed because they were making a mess in the shadows. Speaking of that, I lifted the shadows as well and brought the blacks down in turn.
Probably my favorite moment to shoot. I was down on the steps where they’re off-loading, trying my best to capture the water up close in my foreground, and they come drifting up in my way, haha. So I headed back up the stairs and had a small window of time to shoot them from above before they left. My framing could have been awful, but I think it worked out well, especially with the boat on top to even things out. For editing, I kept this one simple and warmed it up, brought my mids up and blacks down to help the subjects pop, and desaturated the blues till they were almost gone.
This image received the most editing overall. I knew what I wanted in person, but I really didn’t know how to make it. The 35mm focal length only let me get so close, but I wanted the rocks on the top and bottom to look like they were wrapping around each other. I could see it from where I was, but there was so much extra in frame. When I saw the photo for the first time, I brushed it off, because all I saw was the green and purple mess, and half an image worth of sky. A few passes later I remembered what I was after, so I cropped in to what I’d envisioned in the moment, and it started to materialize. I fixed the white balance issues, dropped my blacks and shadows, and removed a few unwelcome colors.
Here’s the simplest of them all. I actually like the blue in the water, but I guess some part of me likes that dark, warmer look a little more. I wanted this photo to look truly overcast and gloomy because that’s how it felt. It was a cold and windy day, and I surely don’t remember so much color. I brought down the clarity considerably to help the fog take over the photo, and I lowered the saturation of more than a few colors. I probably have fifty similar photos on my hard drive, but not one of them feels quite like this one.
Last is another green one. Something I wanted out of this set was a strong attention to color. Even if there wasn’t much of it, I wanted it to be a main focus of mine. With that, some of these photos feel almost monochromatic, and that is by design. For this one, I didn’t want the grass to look so yellow and sickly, but fresh and minty green. It’s obvious that winter is still upon us, but I wanted that to be displayed in a crisp fashion, not a muddy one. Instead of blasting the greens, I lowered them and shifted the yellows closer to green. That’s something I’ll never do unless the entire image relies on that color. Otherwise, I like to keep my yellows shifted a little closer toward orange. Other than that, I raised the exposure slightly and dropped the contrast among other things.