Revisiting Images - Valley of the Gods and Canyonlands
One of the aspects of photographing that has changed for me in recent years has been my interest in different aspect ratios. For me, it involves one of the aspects of photography that I think is uniquely photographic, which is the visual framing of a subject. Yes, framing is present in other arts, but no other art requires you to see through a frame in the same way photography does and to work with what is there within the frame like photography (most other arts you can just eliminate things that you don’t want within the frame - just don’t paint it to be there (ok, I guess there is photoshop these days, but I won’t go there for anything significant)). So perhaps it’s not surprising that I’d eventually get around to exploring different aspect ratios.
I had that period about 10 years ago where I started framing images in a 1:1 ratio, a square, and it opened up a whole new world of seeing and composing. I found it interesting at the time because my earlier efforts to compose images within a square frame with a Rolleiflex TLR was . . . frustrating. It never felt natural. That changed when I revisited the square and for many very productive months, I would limit myself to a square frame on a photo outing. I still revert to the 1:1 aspect ration as my alternative framing, often seeing images within a square composition before working a subject more with a more normal aspect ratio.
As I said, more recently, I’ve been exploring different aspect ratios within the camera. It helps that I can visually switch the way an image is presented through the camera’s control, so I can, for example see and compose in a square format instead of just trying to imagine what a subject will look like if I crop it later. Now the cameras offer you a wide variety of aspect ratios to select from. Boy do I love modern technology, because I’ve never been a fan of “just crop it later.” For me, composing an image within the frame is an important part of photography. With my X-Pro 2, after I’d gotten tired of the 3:2 aspect ratio and wanted to shoot in a 4:3 ratio (before they added the option in the camera settings), I’d actually taped off the right side of the rear LCD so I would see the 4:3 image. I just knew that in Lightroom, I needed to crop at 4:3 and then either slide the frame to the left for a horizontal image, or down ward for a vertical image to see what I framed in the field.
Going through older images though, you don’t have that advantage of cropping in the field. It was still an option though and, if you want to think of it another way, seeing that an image is better if framed in a different aspect ratio is a correction of a composition error I may have made in the field. And that’s how I came about my first image. It was the first of a series of images I made, adjusting as I worked (I changed the location of the camera as well as framing more to the right), that led to what I believe was one of my best images from the trip. But this one was different. It had all of the beautiful light as that final image, but something was off. Neither the foreground nor sky really contributed to the image (like the other final version did), but there was something about the subject matter that was appealing. Then it dawned on me to put it into an X-Pan aspect ratio. It really was about the cliff walls, the light on the landscape, and the subtle intriguing clouds.
Once framed properly, the image just seemed to work and everything fell into place.
After working on that image I continued my scrolling through the trip images, looking at the images I’d bypassed on earlier reviews. I stopped at an image made in Canyonlands NP I’d worked on a bit (I might have even included it in a post about the trip), but had been ultimately dissatisfied with how the color image came out. I realized that perhaps I’d been looking at it wrong, and then converted it into black and white.
That was all I needed. My old darkroom brain kicked into gear and while the image required quite a bit of burning and dodging (it was an incredibly high-contrast scene), I was able to get a result I felt pleased with.
At the end of it, I felt like I would in the old darkroom days, looking at an image on the drying rack and feeling pretty good about the effort.
I returned to my images a few days later and looked at the color image I’d been dissatisfied with. In-between the effort with the black and white image and a tip or two learned from watching a Joe Cornish video where he “developed” an image made by a colleague, a light-bulb went off in my brain, so I pulled up another base raw image and started working on the same image, but the color version this time.
I openly confess to a gross ignorance of color and color theory. I just don’t get it, despite being able to recite some fundamental principles bout color relationships. But I’ve been working at it and pay close attention when someone, especially Joe, talks about working with the colors within an image. He has such a discerning eye and subtle hand, that I often don’t “see” what he sees until he makes the changes and then shows the before and after results. I still have a lot to work on, but . . . .
I realized that why I was so troubled with my earlier efforts with this scene (flowing from the same conditions that made the image so contrasty), was a result of the two vastly different light conditions present in the scene and, more importantly, the different color temperatures of the light. All it took was one larger radial filter and an ever so slight adjustment (going way too far in one direction, then way too far in the other direction, and then back and forth until you can settle on the color temperature that looks and feels “right” - another technique Joe uses) and the image came alive in ways all my previous efforts failed. To be honest, the image below required far less development than the black and white image above or any of my previous efforts.
And if you want to get an idea of how the color temperature (does it look warm, or cool?) adjustment worked in this image, compare how warm the color is in the rocks behind the main tree and to its left, versus the color of the rocks through the opening on the right of the main tree or at the bottom right hand corner. Perhaps it’s a bit too obvious . . . so I still have more to learn about implementing this technique. But seeing it is the first step towards mastery!
The last image I selected to work on that day was not what I would call the most creative of images. Anyone familiar with Ansel Adams or Edward Weston would have seen similar types of images, gnarly trees on a foundation of rocks with a dark sky surrounding branches. Still, that doesn’t mean you don’t make the image, you just have to try to push it in some way so that it isn’t a mindless cliché. In some ways, turning it into a black and white image edged it more towards a cliché, but it was also what allowed an aspect of the image to materialize.
Composition-wise, nothing changed. It’s intended to be a simple composition with three major components - rock, tree, sky. The colors in the color image simply didn’t work to bring out what was immediately evident in the black and white conversion. I saw it instantly, realizing that the color had been a real distraction, but that the image needed work in a very traditional film photography way - the blue of the sky needed to be adjusted. I started thinking of darkening the sky through the use of filters - yellow, orange or red - in part to make the clouds come out. I decided upon a medium (orange) darkening (red would turn the blue almost black - too dark).
Now the black and white photo captures what I was seeing and what the image was really about (what do you mean it’s not about the tree?). It’s an image about textures. The texture of the rocks. The Texture of the tree and its trunk and pine needles. And the wispy texture of the clouds in the sky.
My effort to go beyond the cliché.
That’s it for this round. I’m still slowly going through my trip images. Trying to keep my foot in the photography door and hoping y’all don’t mind.