Variations on Theme

Variations on a Theme: October on Aquia Creek /  by Todd Henson

To set the stage, the weather forecast in late October had called for somewhat overcast skies which I’d thought might work for photographing autumn color reflections along the shoreline of Aquia Creek as seen from Widewater State Park in Virginia. So my father and I set out that morning to find hardly a cloud in the sky. Such is life. 😀

While walking along the shoreline I noticed a pier in the distance and for whatever reason was attracted to it. The sun was up, there was this single long cloud or perhaps a large contrail in the sky, and cormorants were fishing in the creek. I thought the scene might work as a black and white image since there wasn’t a lot of color, mostly the blues of the sky reflecting off the water. I honestly figured any images this day would be sketches of the scene and I’d try returning another day with different weather. As we walked along the shoreline trail I kept photographing this same scene from slightly different perspectives.

At some point either the wind or perhaps a boat created a wake in the water that seemed to reflect the angled line of the cloud. I liked that symmetry so created another set of photos, the results of which can be seen in this post.

October on Aquia Creek (black & white version)

As I’d mentioned, I was thinking black and white while photographing so that’s how I first processed the image, making various tweaks to the underlying colors which lightened and darkened those areas in the black and white version to create what I hoped would be an interesting final image. I lightened up the little bit of water around a cormorant to the right to draw some attention to it if your eyes happen to follow the angled funnel of the cloud and water to that area.

After I’d thought I’d finished the black and white version I decided to see how it might look if fully processed in color, so I went back in and created a new version. I made different adjustments in the color version than I had in the black & white which resulted in both the pier and part of the far shoreline standing out a bit more.

October on Aquia Creek (color version)

I thought I was done. But I remembered there’d been a flock of geese that flew through the scene at one point, which I’d created a few images of, so I went back through all the photos I’d created of this scene and found those. They didn’t have the nice pattern symmetry of cloud and water, which is why I’d overlooked them when looking for the one image I’d work on. And yet I liked what they added to the scene. So I decided to do something I rarely do, pulling the flying geese from one image and copying them onto another. Because of inconsistencies in how I processed the color and black & white versions the geese appear in a slightly different location in each image.

So what do you think? Does either version work? Do you prefer one over the other? Do you think the geese were a good addition or an unneeded one. Let me know in the comments below.

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Variations on a Theme: Mid-May Blooms /  by Todd Henson

Variations on a Theme: Mid-May Blooms

For this look at variations on a theme we explore different ways of finishing exactly the same photograph. This was prompted by a comment from Lashaan of Bookidote on the post, A Flowering Shrub One May Morning, where he wondered how the photos might look in a black and white rendition. So I decided to experiment with one of the photos and see what I could do with it.

Color Version

Mid-May Blooms: Color Version

We begin with the color version. I’ve always been more of a color photographer, I see in color, I’m drawn to color. So most of my photography is processed as color. In this case I love the green background, how the white flowers stand out against it, and the subtle pinks and yellows in some of the flowers. I’m very happy with this photograph.

Low Key Black & White Version

Mid-May Blooms: Low Key Black & White Version

My first thought when interpreting this photo in black and white was to create a low-key image with a dark background and beautiful white flowers. Something bold and dynamic. Something that helped the flowers jump off the screen. It creates a particular feeling from the photograph, and I found I liked this version, as well.

High Key Black & White Version

Mid-May Blooms: High Key Black & White Version

What naturally followed my thoughts of creating a low-key image? Well, of course, creating a high-key image, one much lighter and perhaps a bit more ethereal and soft. Yes, the flowers are white, but that doesn’t mean we can’t create a very soft light grey for the background. The flowers still stand out, but it creates a much different feeling from the photograph. I find I also like this version.

Mid-Tones Black & White Version

Mid-May Blooms: Mid-Tones Black & White Version

Finally, I ended up creating an image that was somewhere between the two previous versions, creating something that perhaps feels closer to reality. This version relies on a nice range of mid-tones, nothing too dark or too light, creating a more balanced image. As you might have guessed, I like this version, too.

Thoughts

There are an almost unlimited number of ways to process any photograph. Even if your goal is to recreate reality as closely as possible there’s still so many choices to make, and very few of us can perfectly remember exactly how a scene looked, so our attempts to recreate it might naturally vary.

Another option is to ignore reality and instead process the image based on your emotions, how you felt about the scene instead of how the scene looked. This can lead to photos that still look real but might not perfectly match the actual scene that day. Or it can lead to images that look very different from that day.

When you decide to process a photograph in black and white it opens an entirely new treasure box full of possibilities. Most of us don’t see in black and white, so any image we create in black and white will be very interpretive. As with color, you can create something that we’ll feel looks real, or you can create something very different from the color source.

When shooting in raw mode our cameras capture all the color information and save it in the image file. We can choose to interpret the photo in black and white by shifting each of the colors to some shade of grey. And as the different versions above show, your choices can create vastly different final images.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this short look at four different versions of the same image. There are countless other ways this image could have been interpreted, and that’s both some of the fun and frustration of post-processing. We have to choose.

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Variations on a Theme: Mushrooms /  by Todd Henson

Mushrooms can be so fascinating, both in their variety and in how you can create such similar but different photographs of them. Todays topic focuses on two different mushrooms I found not very far apart on the forest floor, each growing from a fallen tree. They look very similar but have very different backgrounds and grew on either different fallen trees or different sections of the same tree. This provides an interesting comparison between them, variations on a theme, as it were.

Variations on a Theme: Mushroom #1

Variations on a Theme: Mushroom #2

Click on the photos to get a larger view. If you look very closely one of them has a hidden surprise, a small line of spider silk stretching from the edge of the mushroom.

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