Thursday, January 25, 2024
This isn’t going to be a typical blog entry for a new photo being added to the collection. That ship kind of has already sailed considering the photo that I am going to be talking about was captured on December 21st of 2021. If you click the link, you can see how that trek went and the photos that I decided to share from that trek. Those were all the five-star images after the full culling process. There was really nothing all that different about the trek when it came to how I decided on the keepers. Obviously, for years I’ve not given any particular thought to the trek other than remembering how cool the rat rod truck was which was brought over at the end of the day.
As I’ve mentioned, this year I am wanting to concentrate more on black and white photography because I think it adds another level of artistry to the photographs and I am really starting to enjoy the process of editing in black and white. With that in mind, I have been looking at things differently than I have in the past which has opened up new ideas for compositions for me. Not only has it made it possible to see things differently in the field, I am also starting to see things differently with photos that I have already captured. I find myself wondering how an image will look devoid of all color as I go through my portfolios. I usually keep the edit that I have already done because that was how I intended it to be at the time I made the photograph. It is a nice mental exercise to reconsider some choices and I’m sure eventually there will be some new edits on old favorites that include more of a black and white lean.
Well, I found myself watching a video on YouTube yesterday and it got me thinking about a photo that I shot towards the end of 2021 where I captured an old GMC truck under a dramatic sky. I’ve always liked the photo but felt that the tones were a little heavy in it which has resulted in it falling out of the portfolio since it was added. My thought was to really embrace the contrasts of the tones and do the photo as a black and white edit. It wasn’t something that I felt that I needed to do right away, and I just put it in the back of my mind.
However, towards the end of the day, I received an order for nine prints to be done as canvasses which was an incredible order. I spent most of the morning getting the photos prepared for the output and putting the print order in. While I had Photoshop open, I got to thinking about that GMC photo and decided that I would go ahead and crank Lightroom up and see what I could do with it. I went through the filmstrip until I located the photo and made a virtual copy of it so that I could start fresh without losing my original edit. I went through the different steps and ended up doing two different black and white edits that seemed pretty good. I didn’t like it more or less than the color version, so I was torn with whether or not to keep it.
As I was pondering my options, I could see about a half dozen thumbnails over to the left, a four-star photo was sitting there. I’ve made a habit of keeping those photos that earn a four-star rating during my culling process because I saw something promising with them but might not have felt the edit that I did was any good. I would keep those RAW files on the disk so that I could return to them later on to give them another try. Lots of things change like the software that I use for the edits as well as my own skills and talents. In this photo’s particular case, I think I had fallen in love with two other compositions of the same subject which looked amazing in color. I didn’t see much need in doing a third photo of the subject, and I wasn’t really thinking that much in black and white at the time.
Fast forward a couple of years down the line and I was once again looking at this one photograph that had never been fully edited or released. It was a vertical composition which made it very different from the other two that I had already shared. There was a lot of emphasis on the bare trees above the truck which didn’t really show up in the horizontal compositions. It was different from what I had focused on before, and I thought that it deserved a little bit of attention while I thought about whether or not to finalize the edit on the GMC.
Well, I started to edit the photo knowing that I was going to try black and white for a change. I found the color profile that fit the feeling that I was after and began the edit. It was kind of a slow process getting the edit to come together. There were a lot of difficult areas to work with since I hadn’t shot it with black and white in mind. However, the more I worked the photo, the more I liked it. In the end, it came down to really working the contrast values. This was a two-part process as I started globally with a very low contrast image. The contrast was dialed in through the use of different masks and some attention to contrast on a local level. This allowed me to get the photo that I had started to see.
As I was nearing the end of the process, I showed Toni how it was coming knowing that she is the resident expert on whether or not a black and white image is working. Add to that, she is not all that keen on my old car photos. My thought was, if she liked it, I must have something pretty special. Her response was very positive, and she said that she really liked the photo. It even prompted her to suggest that I enter it in a competition. I’ve kind of let competitions go, but I appreciated the sentiment for sure. That sealed the deal, and I knew that I needed to move forward with this photo. I looked at the two different photos I had been editing and found that the one that I had started with wasn’t nearly as strong as the one of the rat rod, so I abandoned that edit and concentrated on the never released image with this monochrome edit.
There were just a few more little steps that I had to do in order to make it ready. This was mainly centered on some burning of the shadows to give the image a bit more body. That was the trick to make this one really pop. Everything about it seemed to come together wonderfully and it reinforced my reasons for holding onto those four-star photos for times like this. I took a rainy day where I really couldn’t go out and shoot new images and made it a day to release a brand-new photo anyway. Even though this was shot in 2021, I’m counting it as a 2024 edition because it has never seen the light of day before.
I think that this one will have a home in the portfolio for a while. I hope that it manages to make its way into somebody’s home in the near future because I would love to see it printed out on some of my higher end paper options. There really is just no better way to enjoy a photograph than in print form because there are no longer any variables to deal with like brightness of the monitor, or how the colors and contrast are handled. When you select one of my prints, you can be assured that the way it looks is exactly how I envisioned it.
With Winter in full swing, if you are looking to increase your editing skills, consider doing a mentorship with me. It is easy enough to teach the editing process virtually so you can stay in the comfort of your own home, or I can even come to you within a reasonable travel distance. I’ve got several of these sessions lined up through the Winter and they have always worked very well for folks. We can cover the entire process of editing your photos or look at certain modules within Lightroom. Whatever you want to get into, I’m happy to help. It all starts with a free consultation to make sure that I can offer what you need.
Thanks for joining me on this rainy day of editing. I hope you enjoyed, and that you like the photo as much as I do.
Until next time….
