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Photographers delete a high percentage of the images they capture in search of perfection. Look twice before deleting ordinary photographs, because sometimes you can turn ordinary photography into something quite extraordinary. Don’t be impatient. You never know what you may find.
When You See Things in Nature She may Surprise you
I took some photographs one morning while walking along the small canal near my home. The water there is always muddy, and I noticed an eddy, by the small lock gate, about the size of a dinner plate.
It looked pretty, so, I opened my camera and took a snapshot with little thought to how it may turn out. You never know what you’ll find or what you’ll be able to produce if you don’t experiment. You just need to look and take pictures. This will automatically create a sense of the unexpected.
When I am in this freehand mode I abandon convention. The rules of composition, depth of field, shutter speed, light, polarisation, and all the other things scrosanct to great photography are ditched.
Then I had a Lightroom moment
When I checked it out in Adobe Photoshp Lightroom on my PC a few days later, I almost deleted it. A little voice said, wait. So I tweaked the colours, contrast and light a little. This is the result.
In amongst the images, I could see the whirlpool appeared like an island on a dinner plate. In the muddy water there was a perfect reflection of the canal bank, trees and the lock wheel of the sluice gate. Nothing was reflected in the flat water, as it was sucked into the vortex.
Look at the raw unprocessed image of the channel below and you can see what I mean. The eddy was between the two gate wheels. One of the wheels is defined in the centre of the image, but the other is not. You can see the dark green lamyai tree, right centre is reflected centre left above.
Making Abstract Compositions from Photo Editing Ordinary Photographs
I am prone to bouts of experimentation and wanted to create a few abstract art images for my own use. So, I took these three very boring photographs of an egg-shaped pebble I found near the irrigation channel above.
I took the three photographs and loaded them into GIMP (the free Photoshop tool). I had no idea what would happen when I started to play around. Photo manipulation is intriguing, and the results demonstrate how you can turn ordinary images into an extraordinary creation. The surprises to be found in ordinary photos are amazing as you can see by the results.
Imagine how thrilled I was when I discovered ICM, intentional camera movement photography.