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.
For many students in the trimester system, it is now the end of the school year, the end of projects and assignments, the end of homework, the last of the tests and exams until the next academic year begins.
I find it fitting that the image I chose reflects some of this; hands raised in joy as the sun sets on another day. The end of one thing usually marks the beginning of another, soon we begin the “August” or summer holidays, although those in the semester system have already begun theirs 🙂
There was a competition in the Guyana Photographers’ Facebook Group on Colonial Architecture, it was getting very close to the deadline and there were very few entries, I “hurriedly” entered one that I took in passing, not a good shot by any standards, and regretted it immediately after.
Even if I am putting up a photo to “fill up space”, I should pay more attention, I have been less focused recently (no pun intended) , I can’t seem to get myself, the camera and the subjects to comply, to align properly.
I was out with Nikhil on a walk to get a photo for his 365 (366) Project and as we were wrapping up I saw this house and thought I should get a few snaps of it, and I knew right then that I had a better photograph than what I had recently dropped into the competition.
It was heavily overcast, and I deliberately composed it with lots of headroom.
As always, click on the image to see it larger in the Gallery 🙂
Just over a year I took this photo, I wasn’t very satisfied with it then, but then there was another image that had pulled most of my attention away from that same day. There’s just something about fishing boats that pulls your attention though, for this image I had wanted to incorporate the rocks, the boats, the heavily clouded sky, try as I might I could not get all the lines parallel, so I went for an image of divergent lines.
This post will mark the 200th post for this blog (I think that counts the “Hello World” post as well. I suppose if I did a daily photo project and blogged each one I’d be way ahead in count 🙂 For me, its not enough to just post a photo, I want something else to go along with it, some of my thoughts, or insights (or lack of)
There were some little things that I liked about this image; the water pulling away from the area just in front of the rocks, the waves breaking on the lower wall, the two boats at rest and, of course, the clouds 🙂
Be sure to lick on the image above for a much 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.
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.
Only one day of shooting photos this week, terrible! But I did get a very nice one (at least one), and it is somewhat in keeping with my last post “A fascination with skies”.
Both Nik and I needed to get out and get something, as the week had progressed without much photography being done, it was raining and we thought that we might have to abandon the idea (at least for me, since the camera wasn’t going to handle the rain too well), but as we drove the rain eased for a bit and we decided to stop at the Koker at Ogle and see what was there for the offering.
A good thing we decided to stop, I got a few and I am sure Nik got more than I did :-), and as we headed back to “town” the rains decided that we’d had enough of a break and continued its work.
I hope you like this one, it’s another “seawall” shot, and another monochrome 🙂
Click on the image for a better view in the Gallery.
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 had just decided to upload this, and then I gave it a title… Giving it a title brought forth a torrent of emotion. Yesterday I said farewell to my sister-in-law and niece, Areza and Ariel, and in a few months I will be saying the same to my brother André. They have lived at Ogle for all of Ariel’s life and as soon as I titled that image “Sunset at Ogle” I realized that their family is having their sunset at ogle all too soon.
Ariel is my first niece, Areza is my first sister-in-law, André is my first brother, it is strange how those things happen. My parental family may not be the perfect family, but we grew up together, had and have our differences, but at day’s end we are family. I count myself fortunate, in that my brothers and sisters are not just my siblings, they have grown to be my friends, André and Nicholas are the closest of these, but that’s because we grew up like the Three Musketeers, inseparable, always fighting, always in mischief.
If you click on the image and see it at the site slightly larger, you’ll see three figures walking towards the sunset, two adults and a child. Serendipity. This photograph is not of them, but I dedicate it to them, as the sun sets on Ogle.
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