Tuesday, September 29, 2009

#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.