Saturday, January 9, 2010

Pump Up the Volume

I have always admired architectural design photos. The type that are cropped tight and full of color, bright, sunny color. In the past I have made some weak attempts at such photos with less than desirable results. Recently I stumbled upon a blog post on the topic by photographer David A. Ziser (www.digitalprotalk.blogspot.com) which got me thinking about one such photo I had taken in Bermuda last spring. Below is said photo in it's SOOC (straight out of camera) form.

It is flat, boring and quite disappointing. As the photographer I can tell you that this was not the image in my head when the shutter was snapped.

But after some thoughtful cropping (you can read a lot of "do-overs" into that comment), I finally settled on something that I liked. The much tighter crop makes the image less about about a house in Bermuda and more about shape and form and line.

I then began to play with color: hue, saturation and luminance. It was most definitely a trial and error exercise filled with a lot of trial and even more error. But eventually things began to take shape. The image below is the result of throwing caution to wind.

I like the results but I have to tell you that this particular image looks different on my laptop than it does on my desktop where it was originally created. The color is brighter and much more intense on the desktop which poses a question for another day. Which one is correct?

2 comments:

S. Patton said...

Ooooooh....love it!!! Definitely frame-worthy!! We went on our honeymoon to Bermuda and loved it. I still think about all the beautiful flowers and architecture there (definitely more colorful and interesting than Western Pa!!) Thanks for sharing.

Anonymous said...

Very nice transformation, and I liked the addition of your thought process on this one. The Bermuda roofs are fascinating. Talk about a green roof! That is one of my favorite things about Bermuda.