Humble Beginnings

This is an image which attracted me enough to shoot it, but was so boring in the thumbnails I didn't do anything with it for a considerable time. Eventually though, during a quiet moment and looking for some possible images, I decided to see what would happen once I corrected perspective and converted to black and white.

There are two lessons here - sometimes our instinct for a photograph was right, it's just that the image needs so much work the proof just doesn't show it. If shooting only a few images, you are likely to remember this was one worth working on. If on the other hand, as so many of us do when shooting digital, you shoot lots of pictures, the odds of remembering this was a goody are slim to none.

The second lesson is that images which look awful in colour can look really good in black and white. Not only do clashing colours (the red brick and green windows) not interfere in black and white, there isn't the same ties to reality which prevent ramping up the contrast and creating texture where little was seen in the original file. Once manipulated, those windows glow. This image was one selected for Lenswork.