Taking a second look

I'm not sure if I'd call this a slow down period on my photography or not.  I know I haven't picked up my camera since last Saturday, but I know I'll pick it up again this Saturday.  I'm definitely not taking photos at the 365 pace that I did over the last two years.

As far as I'm concerned, that's a good thing.  It's allowed me to look back on some of the images I've taken in the past.  I found several images in old folders that I'd dismissed previously for various reasons.  This photo of Yosemite Valley, taken in the fall of 2008 is a perfect example.  With the cloud layer above the valley obscuring Half Dome in the distance and part of El Capitán on the left, I felt this image was pretty flat and so never have published it before this week.

I went back and looked at it again and thought about what it might look like with some monotone processing, what we used to call black and white.  Black and white is really a misnomer since there are so many varied shades in a monotone shot that it's not just black and or white but varying degrees of shades.  I actually really like this shot a lot now, much more so than the color version, which I assure you, will not see the light of day.

The other shot I worked on this week was this shot I took in July 2007 of the Grand Canyon.  Photographically, I think the canyon looks so much better with clouds overhead and we had perfect conditions for photographs the four days we were there.  Monsoon season was upon us and we had thunderstorms and rain every day of this particular campout.  Not very fun for camping, but great for photos.

This particular image was very flat in appearance, mainly because I'd overexposed the sky quite a bit.  I bumped the contrast up quite a bit on the image which brought out some of the subtler clouds in the sky and some of the color in the rock layers.  Adding some saturation to the shot helped bring out the colors more and I was able to have a more pleasing image that what I had previously.  I have another shot of the canyon that I'm probably going to work on later this week.  I might even do a "before" and "after" shot to show you the difference between the two.  Until then, please enjoy these images.