I have a handful of images from a recent outing – well, four days ago – to feature here, but other things have been taking priority and I’ve been finding myself overextended, which I am now correcting. This does mean trashing some major plans for the time being, though it’s probably for the best. Which doesn’t mean I’m happy about it.
But to make up a little bit for a slow posting month, I’ll throw down four photos here. Well, two photos, with edits, because it seemed warranted.
Jordan Lake was unusually gusty the other day, to the point of producing breakers, and these could be used as additional elements in some compositions – a lot of it was down to the timing. Having a great egret (Ardea alba) as a main subject helped of course.
The day was partly cloudy and often took on the appearance of light overcast, so it muted the colors a bit, but that’s okay – with the waves, it spells out an impending or passing storm, a blustery day with a bit of chill in the air. It wasn’t chilly at all, but we won’t talk about that, just the impressions, and this was evocative enough that it may become a bigger print someday.
Curiously, the image also contains a lot of different colors – not at all strongly, true, but there are a lot of very subtle variations in there, and so I boosted the saturation significantly just to see what it produced:
If you were to flip back and forth between them in the editing or thumbnail programs as I was doing, it seemed more drastic, but here on the page it isn’t too bad at all, though it does seem to reduce the ‘blustery’ aspect of it. All I did was increase the saturation, no color tweaks at all, but the blue reflected from the patches in the sky comes through stronger now. It goes well against the sand background color of the blog at least.
Now the next:
I like the breakers better here, though the egret is looking away. Now there’s this ‘consideration’ aspect to me, as if the egret is contemplating whether to fly off or not, its attention no longer on potential meals – the angle of the head changes the impression that easily. But yeah, a little more profile would have been better, and I waited and watched, but the egret wasn’t that cooperative.
Again with the saturation:
This was twice as far as the boost for the last, ‘against the stops’ as it were – I don’t know what exactly the numbers mean in GIMP, but I’m guessing a 100% increase. Now the contrast between the reflected sky and the natural water color is much more evident. It’s a little too much, as far as I’m concerned, and I should dial it back halfway like the other frame if I’m going to consider making this a print, but I uploaded this one just to illustrate. Often enough, boosting saturation this far looks way worse; it’s only through the low contrast of the original frames that this doesn’t look garish.
That was just a few minutes of fooling around out of curiosity – more are on the way, as I get more time to write it all up. No editing tricks beyond the normal cropping and occasional contrast tweaks for those, I promise.