02-05-16 – Return To The Scene Of The Crime

Day 36 / 401 –

Does this place look familiar?  Ten days ago, I posted a bad photo of this house with it’s roof caved in.  I drove past it yesterday and decided to give it another shot, under different lighting conditions.  This is the result, and it’s much better.

The first thing is that it’s less cluttered, less busy.  I zoomed in quite a bit, leaving out a lot of the trees in the background.  Since this is a black and white photo, sometimes more things in the scene take away from what you are trying to show and say to begin with.  Actually, most of the time that’s the case.  The less things I have in a photo, the better the photo tends to be.  For example, this.  Tree, shed, clouds.  It is exactly what that road is, lonely.  More would have meant less.  More stuff would have meant less feeling.

Back to this photo.  I did a little darkening of the background trees, so they were less emphasized.  In a darkroom, this is called dodge and burn, but this was done in software.  Simple and effective, without changing the overall nature of the image.

I took another shot that was much more square to the house, but you didn’t get the depth of the damage.  With this, you see how big the house it, and you can see inside the roof a bit.

The soft light of the cloudy day meant that there were less harsh shadows to contend with, so there was less need to bump up certain parts and pull back others.  Less manipulation to get the scene.  Soft light and hard light both have their place.  This was a better scene for the soft light.

The simplification was the most important part.  If I had zoomed out more, the house would have competed with the trees and moss, so the focus would have been pulled from what I was trying to show and say (like the previous attempt).  If I had zoomed in more, the scale would have been lost, and the setting would have been taken away.  That’s just framing, but it was a part of the composition of the shot.

I took several shots from three different angles.  I looked at them later to decide which I liked best, which is a major advantage of digital.  I can take a ton of shots and evaluate later with little to no added cost.  But more important was looking at the bad photo, seeing what didn’t work, and deciding to get a better shot later and how to do it.  The bad shot led to the good shot.

Which is to say, keep shooting.  Evaluate the bad, the “failures,” and work towards getting better results.  The vast majority of my shots are misses.  I get the luxury of only showing off my hits.  But if it weren’t for the misses, I wouldn’t get the hits in the first place.