It always amazes me how the subjects that look fantastic when you’re driving past them turn out to be quite challenging when you go to shoot them. This is a classic example. I see this little scene every day on my way home from work, and there are several components that I really like about it. First, I love this style fence. They have a nice, rustic feel to them, and I really like the great wooden texture you can usually pull out of them. Second, I love the little hand cart right behind the fence. I figure, by combining the two, I can get a pretty good shot, and the nice rustic scene would probably look good in black and white.
Enter what some folks like to call “reality.” What the human eye – but not the camera – is excellent at eliminating is the background. Try as I might, I could not find an angle that did not have a very annoying or very distracting background. One side is inaccessible, since it’s on private property. Two of the other three sides stick you with very bright, white houses for a background. Worse yet, they are modern houses, thus destroying the rustic feel of the image. (Some might argue that the anachronistic contrast would be an interesting shot, but in something like this it’s just not my style.) The third, heretofore known as the “lesser of all evils” perspective, is the one you see in the photo. The dense tangle of brush in the background really detracts from the cart. It especially detracts from the wheels on the cart. Even at this angle, I had to crop it heavily to eliminate a bright house to the left, and – having done that – to prevent that post from suddenly appearing dead-center in the image. So the bottom line is, this image does work, but it’s truly not what I had in mind and I’m only marginally pleased with it.
Post processing started out with a simple pop filter in Topaz Adjust. This improved the contrast just a bit, and provided a touch of sharpening. I layered that with a Topaz Adjust Detail 1 filter using a soft light blend mode and a high pass filter at 5 pixels. This was just a sharpening exercise to bring out the texture in the wood. The gradient map I used was a black to a very light blue, using a color blend mode. Levels were adjusted slightly for contrast. A sepia photo filter was added, and then I applied a light contrast adjustment.
The dark edge effect was produced as follows. I created a blank fill layer. With the foreground color set to a medium grey and the background set to black, I applied a Render-->Clouds filter. I then selected the background layer and used the cookie cutter to crop about ¼ inch off the background. (That converts the locked background to a Layer 0 that can then be moved. Very useful feature.) I then dragged the cloud fill layer to the bottom (under that Layer 0) and applied a levels adjustment to deepen the effect even more. I wanted that effect to be subtle, but to deepen the effect a larger portion could have been cropped to reveal more of that layer.
I can understand your frustration having almost all the right componants for a great shot! If the wagon had more space behind it it would have been easier. I still love the sense of age and history and really nice processing!
There's nothing worse that seeing a shot in your mind, but in reality it won't work for whatever reasons, but I really like this shot, and the processing is great,
@karens68 Thanks, Karen. I love these old style fences. @dianneh Thanks, Dianne! I never realized how much old brush we have in this state until I started this project. LOL @allisonrap Thanks, Allison! That pretty much sums it up. LOL My mind can create some amazing shots. Getting them on screen is a different story. LOL
great find and capture... i know the feeling.. some days i take dozens of photos and feel none of them looked like I imagined.. even after processing... maybe taking the photo from under the fence post and focusing on the wagon may give a different perspective
Thanks so much Ron for posting your thoughts on the taking of it. Very interesting to a beginner like me! I often wonder what it is about the real view we see that doesn't get captured in the shot. I hadn't thought about our eye eliminating aspects of the view. I like how this turned out and it's excellent in b&w with your processing!
@dmdfday Thanks, Diane! I did try to get a really low shot as you suggested. Shooting under meant lying down in the road, though, and my growing sense of mortality as I continue to age suggested that might not be the wisest approach. LOL @corymbia Thanks, Amanda! Backgrounds around here, especially this time of year when much of it is still tangled and brown, drive me crazy! Even at f2.8 I don't get enough background blur to tune it out. @honeybees Thanks, Rebecca! I'm really enjoying the shots of you and your sister in that field. The soft tones in your photos are amazing. @tulipgirl Thanks, Alicia! I'm glad you like the details in the description. I can sometimes get, shall we say, a bit long-winded... LOL
April 13th, 2012
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@dianneh Thanks, Dianne! I never realized how much old brush we have in this state until I started this project. LOL
@allisonrap Thanks, Allison! That pretty much sums it up. LOL My mind can create some amazing shots. Getting them on screen is a different story. LOL
@corymbia Thanks, Amanda! Backgrounds around here, especially this time of year when much of it is still tangled and brown, drive me crazy! Even at f2.8 I don't get enough background blur to tune it out.
@honeybees Thanks, Rebecca! I'm really enjoying the shots of you and your sister in that field. The soft tones in your photos are amazing.
@tulipgirl Thanks, Alicia! I'm glad you like the details in the description. I can sometimes get, shall we say, a bit long-winded... LOL