#1 Seeing the picture that I want to see

Click on the picture for a bigger view.

Sometimes, I want to see more in a black & white image. This photo gave me an opportunity to use Canon Digital Photo Professional (DPP) application to help me see the picture that I want within the photograph that I have.

The journey for this picture was from the top; full colour, uncropped. I wanted to focus on the decaying structure, so I cropped tighter, taking the garbage bag out. I then turned the picture monochrome, pushed up the sliders for sharpness and shadow up to the middle of their respective bars, and arrived at the darker image in the middle. Somehow this doesn't capture fully what I had felt when I saw this house/shed. I had been curious about who had lived in it before, what it was used for. What I had in mind was this thought: everything has its history. Things are not in black and white all the time. That prompted me to move the saturation and sharpness sliders all the way down and up, respectively. Then I tweaked the individual sliders in Red, Green & Blue until I saw a hint of greyish green & red. I wanted to show how the building is pushed way back, as if it has retreated into its fate of decaying quietly, even as the greenery around it continues to live and grow.

Death, is only the beginning, said Imhotep in The Mummy (1999) and I saw those words when I first looked at this structure in Taiping, early this year.

Continue experimenting - you never know what you'll see until you look. The final picture is available here on my flickr stream.

Take care.

When does getting up close become getting too close?

Do these come from a real peacock?, originally uploaded by faz k.

It took me a while to digest the 'get too close to the trees and you can't see the forest' saying. While acknowledging the idea in that saying, I am aware that I do need to get close to something to see it clearer. Like in photography, for instance - Robert Capa said, 'if your photos are not good enough, you're not close enough' - or something close to that.

I think we just need to recognize the point where getting up close equals getting too close. Because, even in making pictures, we need to fill the frame. However, if we keep on zooming in, there's a point where we can't see anything but a blur. That's when we zoom out a little, and then we'd see the picture that we need to make. Or the action we need to take in order to get the best result.

Photography. Very much like creating solutions for issues in other aspects of life too, no?

Picture taken with my Canon PowerShot SX100 IS, 1/8 sec, f/3.5, focal length 14.4mm, ISO 80.