Vindauga

Over the past couple of weeks I have begun more and more enamored with taking a photograph that has one section totally blown out while another is lost in shadow. On Friday I went on a walk, shortly after a rain, in which this idea expanded and morphed. I thought it might be interesting to show the progression. I don’t think that any of these are earth shattering (though I do like a few a lot).

This is kind of what I mean when I say that I wanted to blow out portions of the image. The water on the road reflected so much light that the shadows become pits of darkness.

I should probably put this on some sort of gray background, the light reflecting on the water just goes to white. But, again, an example of where my head was when I started my walk on Friday.

Then I got into the woods, which changed the nature of how I would blow things out. I had taken several pictures straight up through the trees while I was in Atlanta so this image is really part of a series of “up” shots. I like how the leaves end up being indistinct. But that led to the the way in which I was approaching the photos that I would take on the walk.

I started out wanting to capture the intensity of the light hitting the leaves, which produced photos like the one above.

I then got really excited about things being over exposed when I came across this scene. I just like how indistinct things became towards the top of the image.

But I was heading West through the woods late in the day, so even though I initially stopped to take a look at the very bright section on the shrubs, I caught sight of the shaft of light, which basically derailed my thoughts of blowing out sections (even though that became an aspect of the picture).

So, now my goal was to capture shafts of light, which meant that parts of the image were likely to be blown out while others would be extra dark (I am doing this with a point and shoot after all).

I think this one might win for photos taken that day (and I have several versions, none of which have a settled on yet).

This one too, I like a lot.

This is near the end of my walk. I think they came out well. But, I had, at some point, decided that capturing the shafts of light would be better in black and white. So, I have some of those as well.

Since I took some of the images twice, once in color and once in black and white (yes, I know that I can desaturate an image but I have noticed that I never do, easier to take it twice) I will avoid repeating the images.

I’m not sure what to add or how to end this discussion, I don’t really have a conclusion.