How ordinary photographs can surprise you.

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 to extraordinary photography. Don’t be impatient. You never know what you may find.

Nature has beautiful surprises

It was brought home to me when, purely by chance, 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 just snapped it, with little thought to how it may turn out.

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. To my surprise, this is what I saw.

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Eddy

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. As you can see, nothing was reflected in the flat water, as it was sucked into the vortex.

Look at the picture of the channel 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 not the other one. You can see the dark green lamyai tree, right centre is reflected centre left above.

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Irrigation channel – Huai Kaew village, Chiang Mai

 Abstract images from ordinary photographs

I am prone to bouts of experimentation and wanted to create a few abstract art images for my own use. So for starters, I took these three very uninteresting photographs of an egg-shaped pebble I found near the irrigation channel above.

Then I took a white plate and played around with the two objects.

I took the three photographs above 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 to extraordinary photography. The surprises to be found in ordinary photos are amazing.

Just as I found when I discovered ICM, intentional camera movement photography.

I’m sure you can use your imagination to marry the three resulting images with the originals.