Alternative Presentations
Here is another composition from my short trip to Ricketts Glen State Park. (The other composition.) And I want to take the opportunity to say a little about the possibility of showing more than one interpretation of a digital shot (capture).
A while back I did a post titled Digital Has Changed the Way We Shoot. In it are links to a few of Brooks Jensen’s audio podcasts. These particular podcasts were about the differences in how he used to shoot with film and how he now shoots with digital capture. In part, he talks about when he shot with film needing to capture the tonal values the way he wanted them to show in the final output (print). But with digital he wants to capture, not necessarily the best looking image, but rather a file that contains the most data for future post processing.
When I was capturing this image I did so with the intent of converting it to Black and White. While enhancing the color version I really liked the two bright yellow areas at both ends of the log. I brightened those areas because I thought that they really drew the viewer’s eye to the log that then acted as a leading line to the waterfalls. In the color version the subject, the falls, is the brightest and area of highest contrast. But in the B&W version the bright yellow areas were very close tonal value of the falls thus drawing the eye a bit too much.
So with the B&W version I did a slight corp removing a little from the bottom and a bit on the right (keeping the 2×3 aspect ratio). I then darkened the bight yellow area near the base of the falls.
In the color version I chose to leave the top of the frame the way it was captured–fairly even in tone and contrast. However, in the B&W version I chose to brighten the one tree to almost mid tone to create a little interest at the top of the frame. But not bright enough to compete with the brighter falls, the subject; or to lead the eye out of the frame. I also added a vignette to the B&W version to enhance the contrast of the falls even more.
I know these are a bit buried in the details so here are the two key take-aways:
- During capture don’t be too concerned with how the image looks; rather, be concerned about capturing the most data. This usually means Expose to the Right (ETR), keeping the histogram as close to the right hand side without clipping highlights.
- During post production let your vision for the image drive your choice of edits.
- Before you begin making edits create a mental list of areas that need work to bring the image closer to where your vision want to take the image.
- But also be open to other ideas you have during editing that might make for an even stronger composition.
As a bit of a side note, all editing on both version of the image was done in the raw converter. (While ACR does have a feature called snapshots that will permit keeping both versions (color and B&W) as part of the file’s metadata, Lightroom’s Virtual Copy feature makes it much easier to keep track of both interpretations.) Neither of these were taken into Photoshop.
The shooting meta data for this image is:
D200 with 24-70 @ 29 mm
8 sec @ f/8 ISO 100
Matrix; Aperture Priority; Ex Comp +2/3