Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Reel Ends


A reel end from cable spools. FZ50 on the weekend.

6 comments:

Rosie Perera said...

I reelly like this one! ;-) Nice combination of straight and curved lines. Excellent choice of where to place the line of the edge of the topmost reel. The fact that there's one skewed reel on top of a pile of stacked ones makes it more interesting. Great contrast -- the texture in the wood shows up well. Black and white works superbly for this shot. All in all, one of your most satisfying images in the past few weeks since I started following your blog.

George Barr said...

Rosie:

thanks for your kind comments. The orignal file of course is in colour and low contrast and includes a bit more of the stack down at th bottom and to the right and I wasn't impressed with the image. It got a bit better when I cropped out the excess to the right to meet the curve in the corner, better yet when I lost some of the bottom but still didn't impress me. I converted it to black and white, bumped up the contrast about 3 times, use akvis enhancer to show the grain better and saved it for the web. In editing the blog it still looked weak so back to Photoshop and did some burning in rather than increasing contrast and liked the image quite a lot.

Rosie Perera said...

Wow! Your hard work paid off.

doonster said...

I spent quite a lot of time looking at this one. I might have personally chosen a slightly different crop but one thing came to mind when i read your comments: a question I often ask myself is "is this picture worth pursuing?". The point being, when does one press on as you did here, and when does one abandon as a lost cause? I suppose, in principle, that any shot in focus with all the elements prsent could be pursued to a satisfactry conclusion.

Andy Ilachinski said...

Your image + postprocessing together provide a textbook example of what distinguishes a "point and shooter's" approach from that of an artist. An otherwise "bland" object, that perhaps would not garner even a second's worth of attention from a P&S passerby, is not only "seen" and tehnically well captured, but then, after the fact, lovingly crafted into what effectively becomes an (artistically) enhanced version of itself. It is the care that is put into fullfilling that final vision, of course, that ultimately identifies one as either a craftman or point-and-shooter. Nicely done (as always).

George Barr said...

Andy: many thanks. I am intrigued at the number of known photographers (not you obviously) who think they will be able to do most of their work in Lightroom with it's mostly global adjustments. There is so much more to making a good image and limiting oneself to only those scenes that are so right, so brilliant that they need little in the way of changes, seems at least frustrating and actually self defeating.