Golden hour light and nice depth produced a challenging capture for me … I like both colour and monochome takes on it, but lean towards monochrome - a texture-rich environment just begging for attention!
My biggest difficulty has been with navigating the waters between what is visually pleasing to my eye (but clipped in shadows) and that which has less visual impact (but is technically superior).
I’d love to see the ways in which others might process this, and hear your reasons.
I like it in colour because they are all pastel and there are not so many different colour (brown, green, gray, yellow). This way, it reveal the peacefulness of the place.
For me, the end of the Sanctuary sign miss a little sharpness. Could you have taken this shot at 1/125s and f/11 instead of 1/500s and f/5.6 ? This would have increased the depth of field and maybe add more sharpness to the sign.
I think you should go for what please you.
I don’t think you can oppose what is visually pleasing for you and what is technically superior. For me, there is no universal way of developing a photography. Play raw threads are a good example of the variety of way to treat a photo. None of them are better than other. Some will attract you more than other but that doesn’t mean others are bad.
Thanks for the feedback - yes, depth of field is lacking and the end of the sign is sadly not in proper focus. In hindsight I would certainly try to expose for better depth of field; I was mostly shooting birds where fast shutter speed is imperative!
You may be interested to know that the tree at the right is on a traffic island and there is a lane of roadway either side of it - one between the sign and the tree, another between the tree and the rising land behind it.
I have a love-hate relationship with this photo. The angle at which we are viewing the structure is a bit infuriating but the tension is unique – I want to move to the right to see the dragonflies and letters more clearly but I can’t. Not sure if that was your intent.
The angle is deliberate … I am obscuring the road I mentioned above. Also the geometry and texture at golden hour interested me more than the depiction of dragonflies as a subject.
Is possibly the lack of clear focus at the end of the sign a subconcious part of your infuriation?
I was referring to the engraving (don’t know the proper term). When viewed at an angle, the details and contours are different from and harder to make out than viewed perpendicularly. This causes a tension of sorts, esp. on the typography. It is both cool and infuriating.
In the next step I darkened the whole picture even more and with the help of dodge technique I only lightened certain areas around the monument a little bit.
By the way, I did not use GIMP tool dodge and burn, because with this tool brightened or darkened areas look very “washed out”.
It would be better if for the brush of this tool, blend modes and color could be set. Any GIMP developer here?
For dodging I used the usual method - new transparent layer with overlay blend mode and white brush with low opacity:
Now is the time to give this clean look a little local contrast and restore the brightness of the image at the same time. One of the tone mapping algorithms, which is very often abused for HDR photos, is very suitable for this - Mantiuk 2006.
On duplicate of BW layer I applied (Colours - ToneMapping - Mantiuk 2006):
Now we have emphasized the details and balanced the contrast of the image.
Next step is to give the picture a vintage look. For this I used film emulation in G’MIC (G’MIC - film emulation - PictureFX - AnalogFX - Sepia Color 50% Strength):
Last step was to emphasize that vintage look even more by adding some noise on duplicate layer (Filters - Noise - HSV Noise) Dulling = 5, Value= 0,5. After lowering opacity of that layer, merging down and final adjustment of contrast with curves result is:
