ESFotoClix Blog

In my previous post I showed some photos from my recent visit to Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs, Colorado. When I started to review these photos, the colors and lighting were so compelling, I didn’t give anything but a color treatment a thought. Fortunately, I left on vacation, and after coming back, I started exploring several “lesser” images with B&W conversion. Here an image I first post-processed in color.

It dawned on me that I was missing all the textures in the red rock. Sure, I could bring it out with some drastic post-processing, but the results would be anything but pleasing — simply too far off reality to be acceptable. With B&W, on the other hand, I could push those textures out without being bound to the expectation of realism. The result is shown below.

Surprisingly, though color is generally an aid to depth perception in otherwise two-dimensional photos (warmer colors advance, cooler ones recede), in this case, it is the B&W version that really pops with depth and separation of foreground vs. background.

Truth be told, these next 3 images are the ones that made me go back and reconsider B&W. Shot on an overcast day, the skies did not feature the compelling blues of the first photo, and B&W helped focus attention where it mattered: on shape/form and texture.

We can read all the articles and books we want about how B&W photography accentuates shapes and texture, but there’s nothing like some hands on experience to bring the point home.

I recently had a chance to hike for a couple of hours through the Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs, CO. Very nice lighting bathed the large rock formations. My first impulse was to capture it all, and multi-frame panoramas seemed one good way to approach the subject. Here are three samples.

Panoramas are often challenging compositionally. They tend to throw everything in and leave the viewer wondering what the point of the photo is or who/what is the subject. Sometimes, however, they provide the best method to capture wide vistas.

Some of you may have noticed something odd about the image we saw in the previous blog entry. The lighting seemed to come to the bottom.

Sometimes called, “horror lighting,” in this case the odd lighting is caused by a trick I played to invigorate the original photograph, which looked more like this:

My thought was that the original’s downward slope was, well, a downer. I was aiming for a dynamic composition with the diagonal arrangement for my subject, but it felt dynamic in a down-hill sense. To correct this, I flipped the image along the horizontal axis to get more of an upward feeling. Unfortunately, I also flipped the location of the sun.

Oops.

After thinking about it a bit, I decided to opt for a vertical composition, achieved through a simple 90 degree rotation to the left (counter-clockwise). Now I get the effect I wanted… without the “horror lighting.”

A little wiser from the experience, here’s how I left a shot of the same bloom, taken a few hours later.

Take away lesson for me: don’t just think about the quality of light, but keep the direction of light also in mind, both during shooting and in post-processing.