Surprise

I spent the afternoon photographing a local park. Originally it had been a working ranch only minutes from our house and my wife used to board her horse there. Eventually the ranch was broken up for development and how hosts hundreds of houses in a new sub-division. Forutnately the forrested area was saved. I was standing on a small log bridge and the view was pretty enough but it was all light and shadow and I really didn't think it would photograph well - if at all. I shot it anyway, not even bothering to multiple expose because I didn't think it worth the effort.

After working on all the "good" images which turned out to be pretty disappointing, I decided to at least have a look at this image. I first noted that despite the sun and shade, the camera had recorded the contrast very well and it actually looked more even in the image than it did standing there - how often does that happen?

Next I decided to bring it into black and white (using the black and white adjustment layer in Photoshop CS3 - and suddenly the dappled sunlight looked really nice, especially with a bit of filtering (ie. using the individual colour sliders in the black and white conversion adjustment layer.

A little darkening of the water, slight cropping on one side and eliminating a fair amount of foreground water so the banks came to the corners and you see here the results. Frankly, a hell of a lot nicer than I predicted at the scene. Below is the original colour image, pleasant but hardly interesting.