Greetings, Campers!
This week finds me even a bit more scattered than usual, since my lovely and capable wife is currently in New Zealand helping a family member who is going through a very rough patch. So far, I’ve managed to keep myself clothed and fed during the week she’s been gone; though now that the peanut butter pretzels have run out, I may have a difficult three weeks ahead.
We’re also well into football season now, which is always fraught for me. Tragically, I grew up in the Washington DC area, so by law I am a fan of DC sports teams; and football is my favorite sport. Which means that, as a fan/hostage of the Washington Commanders (nee Redskins), I spend most seasons with a paper bag over my head. As they used to say many years ago about the Washington baseball team, “First in war, first in peace, and last in the National League.” Fortunately, as long as my camera and Photoshop still work, I always have something to take my mind off the NFL.
Since my last post, I’ve been working on a new treatment for some of my animal photos.
Some months ago, I took this photo of a curlew running along the sand spit that shelters Morro Bay from the ocean:
(Okay, I think it’s a curlew, but I’m not particularly well informed on this stuff. I’m pretty solid on the notion that it’s a bird, in any case.)
So, the picture is… okay. I played with the background saturation and brightness in order to make the bird pop a bit, but it’s still kinda meh. And I have a raft of other photos that are pretty similar.
A couple weeks ago, I decided to try changing up the backgrounds a bit by going dark rather than light — but also keeping part of the image in natural light. With the curlew as an example, I came up with the version you see at the top of the article.
What do you think? I felt like that made a pretty solid improvement; the bird still pops, but the image now seems a lot more dynamic, and the translucence of the dark curtain enhances the feeling of depth.
Since that experiment, I’ve been trying out similar treatments with other seabird photos as well as other types of animals — like this lovely nest of sunbathing female elephant seals:
The title of this image, by the way, is I Heart Elephant Seals. Because I totally do.
Here again, the dark curtain enhances the dynamism of the image, which otherwise dulls substantially when the background is nothing but dun-colored sand.
As it happens, black isn’t always the best color for the background treatment — such as, for instance, when the foreground subject is already dark or heavily shadowed. Fortunately, a colored curtain can often lend the same effect, as well as expanding the palette of the image:
Here, I actually used two color layers, one black and one using the same red as that in the gull’s beak, to add some depth and dynamism to this photo.
Have an opinion about the photos? Feel free to drop me a line on the contact page and let me know what you think!
