brookgreen gardens

Leaves

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Experimenting with interpretation is one of the most enjoyable aspects of photography today. I must confess that I don't always know at the time of capture how I want the image to appear in the final state. Brookgreen Gardens stood out to me as a place of structure. The complex entanglement of the Oak trees, the beautiful sculpture work on display, and the lines and form of leaves and plants. This plant has a very green color to the leaves, but I found that too distracting from the original motivation for the image and that was the structure and lines. I didn't really envision a black and white presentation so I played around with some of the Light Room default color schemes. The one that represented my original vision most clearly was the "aged" scheme. The leaves really seem to respond to this color presentation. I apologize for not having comparison images, but I also believe they may be more distracting than educational. My main point is to experiment with all of the tools we have available today. Knowing what tools are available can only make one more proficient in the field knowing how to apply those tools to the interpretation at the moment of capture. I will continue to share with you more images from Brookgreen over the coming weeks. Take care.

Oak Tree-Revisiting the image

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While I enjoyed the "unreal" presentation of the original "Oak Tree Canopy", there were two items that continually gnawed at me. One was that the midtones were just too MIDTONED! So I applied another curve to the image to raise the mid and upper tones a bit on the scale. The second bother was that the image looked too "squatty." It simply looked compressed. So I elongated the image with the transform tool in PS and I like the aspect ratio much better now. Since I make no bones about manipulating images, this image is certainly no attempt at representing "reality." I will address the reality of photography off and on in this blog, but as you may have guessed, the camera is certainly not a truth-teller. I hope you enjoy the discussion of the revisit and have a great day.