Saturday, October 26, 2024 (continued)
OK, I know you are getting tired of hearing from me with successive blog posts over the weekend, but at least they have all been positives with lots of new photos being added. This one will be a short one because it is just a bit of a continuation from my morning at Price Lake on Saturday. If you haven’t already, drop by and check that blog out to see how the day went. As I was going through the photos, I ended up culling out the post sunrise shots from the spot that I had set up originally because I felt that the earlier photo was a better overall capture of the experience. The ones that had more color to them just seemed a bit too dramatic and upbeat for how I was feeling at the time. Things had been so calm through the day and that was the emotion that I had brought home with me. That first image of the time just before sunrise captured the whole experience for me.
While I was feeling the excitement of the morning growing while working with the new rusty subjects yesterday, I started to feel different about the more colorful images that I had shot at the lake. Yeah, I think about previous treks while I’m concentrating on new ones. It helps me figure out new ways of capturing subjects while allowing me to learn where I could have done things differently before. In this case, the change in mood had me finding a new understanding of the more dramatic images that I had shot the previous day.
I knew that I had some square crops, horizontal, and a few vertical compositions as the clouds were picking up some moderate color despite being low level clouds. I remembered the clouds progressing off diagonally over the mountain, but they were collected off to the right as was shown in the later panorama. However, that seemed to work in the square crops, but that framing is usually reserved for more calm photographs which the colors and the light didn’t really go with. However, I had shot all of the square crops as a vertical originally, so I knew that I had the option of stretching the image up and down thanks to the RAW file. I figured when I got home, I would give it a try real quick before importing the current day’s photos into Lightroom.
I did just that and went back through and culled out the best option, which was a two-star image from my original culling. The framing was off for the look of the photo which I changed by making it a short vertical image. This allowed me to place the horizon slightly off center to give a bit more visual tension which fit with the colors. I then started to do a basic processing on it which didn’t really work for the way I was wanting to present the image. I got it close, but I still felt that the pano was a better rendition of the scene with light on it, and the overall blue one was much stronger at capturing the mood of the morning. I didn’t give up on it though.
What I did was put it aside while I checked out what I had captured from my new trek. That turned into a kettle of fish that didn’t conclude until like 1am. By this point, I was too tired to care about revisiting the edit on a trek that I had already put to bed. However, when I finally woke up and got downstairs this morning, I went back into Lightroom and looked at the photo. The decision had been correct to not post it yesterday because the crop was still off, and I didn’t like the colors. The scene was extended a bit side to side, back to the original framing, and I shifted where the horizon was slightly. This felt much better and included the right combination of clouds. I then went into the color grading tab where I tweaked the colors to a combination of what was there and what I was remembering. That brought it together quite well. The last thing that I did was pull some of the cyans out of the sky to make it a more neutral blue that worked with the reds that had been introduced. With that, I was happy with it and showed it to Toni who loved it and wondered why I had waited so long for this image.
Here is the final version of that straggler image from Saturday morning. I like it because it does give an alternate to a long panorama and a standard crop horizontal. The vertical adds some visual tension because the main subject is a level horizon, but this framing adds importance to the clouds which became the focal point for the image because of the framing. Do I like it better than the other two from the morning…I don’t think so, but it does capture a completely different mood and one that appealed to me after a morning shooting rust under the clouds. It is just another version of the story that I neglected to tell on Saturday.
This is the reason that I will usually keep my imports in Lightroom for a while after I finish the edits. Every so often, an experience like this happens where I think through the files and remember something that I didn’t edit. If a RAW file has that kind of staying power in my mind, there is probably a good reason for it, and it might just be worth another look and a bit of processing. It really paid off here and I hope that you enjoy this one as much as the others from the morning.
Until next time…
