A Second Bite Always Brings the Results

I have to admit to being a bit of a perfectionist.  Those that read my blog regular will know that I often call myself my own worst critic.

Just before Christmas, I posted some images of a river and waterfall that I had taken.  Although they were quite pleasing they weren't exactly what I was after.  In fact they were far from it.  As it happens fate would intervene and set me on the right track.

A good friend of mine lent me a copy of The River by Ted Hughes, one of my favourite poets.  Accompanying the poems was a series of photographs taken by Peter Keen.  The photographs in this book gave the impetus to return to the river and re-shoot and yeas, I came back with the shots I wanted.

 It's true that I re-shot some of the wider landscape images again.  This time I wanted a monochromatic image that brought out the movement of the water along with its texture and that of the rocks.  I also wanted something more abstract so I looked for patterns in the currents and so shot some images like the one at the top of this post.

With this image I wanted to process it so it had a sort of retro film feel to it.  The image itself was taken with a faster shutter speed so the water didn't go completely milky; that some texture was preserved.

Again this image was shot in pretty much the same way.  Getting close in to the water, keeping the aperture open and ISO up to keep the shutter speed up; to give a sense of movement but to pause some of the action.  With this a similar treatment to the top image was applied to give it 'a film' feel.

The wider landscape shots were to give that feel of texture and movement and were all treated in the same way.

Finally, I came to the shot of the day.  Sometimes you just see something and you know that this is the image that you want.  You look through the viewfinder and you now know you can trust your eye.  You set the camera to get the look to the image that you want and you step back and fire the shutter.  When you get the image on the back of the screen you see it is everything you want it to be but you don't get your hopes up.  There is a big difference between whats on the back of the camera and what is on your processing screen.  But, when you get home and open it on the screen and it is exactly how you wanted it you get very excited.

Then comes the responsibility of processing, which to be honest can make or break the image.  For once the image below had a lot of work done on it.  The initial phase a process in Lightroom then opened up in Photoshop for selective sharpening and quite a bit of dodging and burning to bring out the texture in the image.  This is my shot of the day.

Perhaps my next journey back to the river will yield different results!