Saturday, August 28, 2010

Seeing Doesn't Rest


I was sitting, reading and drinking tea when I noticed both the position and lighting on my wife's feet. I asked her not to move, retrieved my dSLR, located the battery (in the charger) put in a fresh memory card, erased it, and shot a few pictures before thinking to check ISO - 3000, so adjusted that and took a few more, closer or further, more or less tightly cropped.

I lightened the red channel, used fill light to open shadows, reduced contrast and applied blur selectively to a copy of the image, then toned it.

The point of course is that I wasn't thinking about making images. This wasn't a deliberate effort on my part to be observant. Mind you, I suspect that it comes from practicing deliberate seeing.

I have no idea yet whether this is a good image - I can only say that at the moment it pleases me. I like the almost marble sculpture effect.

1 comment:

Tim said...

You're entirely right about `practicing deliberate seeing'.

I've been doing an intimate-landscape a day, with the rule that everything must be b&w and 3:2. To start with, I relied on the LCD to preview the b&w conversion; now I point and click and quite often it works well anyway, through practice.

The marble-effect processing is most excellent.