Photography; I shoot what I like, and sometimes people like what I shoot. All photos are copyright to Michael C. Lam unless explicitly stated otherwise.
On a recent photo-walk with Nikhil and Sharon on the seawalls up the East Coast of Demerara, I found myself looking at the scenes around me and shooting without really thinking too much about it, almost on automatic. I saw things to photograph, they caught my eye and I took a few snaps.
I wasn’t inspired, and I thought to myself that I’d be coming away with something “normal”, something that I would be happy with but not overjoyed.
On the walk back to the vehicle, I happened to walk under a fisherman’s shed, and the scene that caught my eye was different in a few ways from all that I had seen, nothing spectacular, but just different enough for me, and I stopped, took the time to set up the camera for a few bracketed exposures, and took two sets of exposures for later HDR-processing.
This was the result: At Rest.
Click on the image above to see it better in the Gallery.
Nikhil does more unusual cropping than I do, often times he’ll use the cropping to help emphasise the subject, and this is something I don’t often do, usually when I crop I try to keep the same proportions as the original image, and I try to crop very little, usually only as a corrective method (to rotate the image correctly of to remove something at the edge(s) that shouldn’t be included). I often forget that I can crop for emphasis and to strengthen the composition.
This week’s image is such an example, I originally thought that it was a good image, but for some reason it wasn’t as strong as I’d originally thought, so after some monochrome work on it I tried an unusual crop, and I think it worked.
Click on the image for a better view in the Gallery.
Just a little ramble from me, this is not instructional in the literal sense. A fellow blogger and photographer, Nigel (or greysqrl) always asked me to write a tutorial on my monochromes and specifically my black and white photographs, but I’ve never felt that I had an “art” to it or a specific sequence of steps in the methodology to really do a tutorial type of blog, so I thought that at least I can do some rambling or musing on the subject.
Back when I shot with the Canon S5 Super-Zoom bridge camera (basically a hyped-up point-and-shoot) there were several colour modes including black and white and sepia, so I had disciplined myself to taking the scenes that appealed to me in these aspects in those modes, so I never had a full-coloured version of the photograph for any sort of comparison. So for me, the idea of a scene being in monochrome always started out before I pressed the shutter-button.
After I started using a DSLR (for now the Canon T1i or 500D) I learnt about post-processing further, using RAW images, etc. Now, I still consider many scenes in monochrome and earmark them for that specific type of processing later, but I also change my mind about some scenes that were not considered for monochrome initially.
What makes a good monochrome image? I really never thought about it, I just “feel” that some scenes make better monochromes than others. I am sure that as I continue my photographic journey I will learn more about what actually makes a good monochrome, to me it’s a “old” looking scene, or a scene with high contrasts, or in many of Nikhil’s cases one with lots of texture 🙂
How do I process a monochrome image? Since all my current images start out as full coloured, it is usually that “feel” that helps me select the ones for monochrome, either that or the new method of processing as colour and then it doesn’t quite come out the way I want and I send it over to monochrome just to see what would happen 🙂
I use Lightroom as my primary image processing and workflow application, but the majority of my monochromes are done in Nik Silver Efex (after some processing in Lightroom). I take each photo on its own merit, some need to be treated softly while others need to be more contrasty and structured. Nik Silver Efex has a range of presets that you can view easily and then do your own fine-tuning.
With scenes that have clouds (I seem to have many of those now) I always go for bringing out or enhancing the detail in the clouds. The dynamic range captured using a single exposure is not (always) a true representation of what the human eyes saw or can see. Often I would look at the scene and see the nice detail in the foreground, then look up and see the layering in the clouds, but when the photograph is taken I lose some detail, and In post=processing I try to retain that detail that I saw.
Dry Docked?
This particular photo was not intended as a monochrome image, the upper portion of the boat (or lower portion in the image, since the boat is upside down) was yellow and I had initially intended to emphasize that, but it didn’t work out as planned.
Sometimes we just take a walk out to the seawall for, well, a walk 🙂 We go to see the boats, walk in the water, enjoy the breeze… well, the children go walking in the water anyway.
This photo was taken on one of those walks, there’s a spot at Lusignan where the boats that have finished their day’s fishing are moored, the fishermen are finishing up their day’s work, where the catch of the day is off-loaded and packed for sale, it was at this spot we walked to, my daughter and her cousin are down at the water’s edge, and I’m walking ahead to look back and, or course, snap some photographs 🙂
I could try saying a lot more, but I think in this instance the photo can speak for itself 🙂
Since the members of the Guyana Photographers (Facebook Group) started doing PhotoWalks it has provided me with other opportunities to get out and do some photography, as well as to see and admire the photos emerging in the group from these walks, there truly is a lot of enthusiasm and talent among the members.
On one of those walks (this one was to the villages of Good Hope and Triumph, I got what I thought were good shots, then I saw what others put up and realized that mine were all just OK 🙂
I fell into the trap set by all the enthusiasm and put my better shots onto the Group’s Page, without thinking to reserve at least one for this post, so a-hunting I went through my images for one that I could use. You can check out some of the photos from the group in the 3rd Photo Walk album Facebook.
For the seventh week of the year, I fell ill from the Tuesday and didn’t catch myself until the Friday (almost, I was still a little out-of-it through the weekend), so I effectively had one photographic day of that week, so one of the images HAD to work for the Deck. As fate would have it, I didn’t get to process any of those images until today, so I am a little late this time around for the Deck, but better late than never, as they say.
For that week I took a total of thirteen photos (that number alone should have told me it would be a bad week), of those, seven were snapshots for a pre-valentine’s day dinner that my family had and those went up on Facebook, and the remaining six were all from a walk that Nikhil and I took to the seawall, so I just picked one that seemed marginally better than the rest and processed it.
I was about to title this post “The Monkey and The Camera”, because Nikhil might have been right about that day at La Bonne Intention, a monkey with a camera may well have managed to take a good photograph.
In hindsight, I really should have switch to my ultra-wide lens earlier that day, but even with the Tamron 18-270 mounted on the camera, I still got wide enough to capture the truly “awesome” sky that was prevalent at the time.
I’ll let this photo speak for itself. (Click to see larger)
This last week I took quite a number of photos, and the choice for the image for the deck was a little more difficult. In the end it came down to a choice of several from the Trip out west that Nikhil, Naseem and I took last weekend.
I will eventually process all my favourites from that trip and load up an album, but for now I will just give you the one I chose for the 2011 Deck as well 🙂
Of all the water crafts that were at the conservancy, one in particular caught my attention, it was a tug-boat (I think they’re called that), it was quite distinctive from the other shallow boats and canoes on the water, and definitely more appealing than the barge that was moored nearby 🙂 It reminded me of cartoons I watched as a child, and I fully expected to see either Bluto or Popeye on deck!
I was recently reminded that I am primarily a Guyanese photographer (yes, I just referred to myself as a photographer) and that my header image was somewhat inappropriate, it being a panorama from Sint Maarten.
So when Nikhil, Naseem and I went for a drive out West on Saturday, I made a point of trying at least one Panorama image to replace the header with.
The header is cropped to fit the available space in the theme I am using, so I’ve included the original below which you can click on to see larger at the site.
This is a scene of the Conservancy down at the back of Canal Number 1, West Bank Demerara, approaching Sunset and waiting in vain for the colours to get more spectacular. 🙂
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