* Wednesday C&C "No Theme" Thread #856 / Revived #076 on 2024 09 11 *

When I posted this photo I had just returned from a hot and disappointing day walking up and down hills between galleries (some of which turned out to be closed or had specific, previously unannounced closures of some exhibits for photography) on Naoshima. I quite like the photo I posted but it wasn't what I had been looking forward to shooting when I set out.

That's a very interesting comparison. Curiously, your photo is almost as if you were looking at mine through a window.

One of the things I'm coming to learn about abstract photos is to look at them from all angles with an open mind. My shot is of a steel pier in a boat basin. It originally presented itself as seen below. But once I rotated it, it became a mountain scene, maybe in China. Here is a similar shot to the unedited original:

I'm not sure these came out very well, I shot this on my phone and edited in lightroom on my phone.
The tiny screen makes this very difficult for me.

You can edit.

The combination of the photo and the title and the gull's accusatory expression made me smile. The molded design does indeed look like 100 eggs rowed up and I began to follow your storyline and imagine the gull was fooled by them. It's a cute shot with a great little story.

Lovely rainbow and the rainbow IS the story and the subject here. I really like the concept of black and white for a rainbow, something I've never tried and am now asking myself why I have never thought of it. Like many phone images, it is noisy, and the noise multiplies when you do any editing on them. A dose of noise removal might help.

I already liked the original photo (and the story).
Good angle resulting in a classic and harmonious symmetrical composition.
The lighting of the windows adds a lot.

And then Dan made the image pop some more.

One last touch is missing: the sky, which has been replaced quite well, should at least be as bright as the reflection in the swimming pool.
I notice that we are getting further and further away from real photography.
Does the moment captured with the camera have anything to do with reality?
What is this forum actually about?

The explanation in the op is very clear to me.

But creativity in Photoshop is much more difficult than in photography.
What isn't there in the photo could probably only be added in Photoshop by very talented painters. Because they have a feeling for light and shadow, color moods and reflections.
Photographers usually lack the eye for this, which I see again and again in this forum.

All the original and edited images in this thread are within the scope described in the op.

Just post the type of images you are interested in within the op's scope just like everyone does.

I think I can comment on every post in this forum.
It's about whether whatever you do at least corresponds to human perception.
Without contradictory elements, the spectrum is very broad.
Then, of course, artistic freedom comes into play...

This is where I and I suspect some others disagree, at least to some extent.

If the intention for a final image is a close as possible documentary representation of the scene then yes I totally agree with you that the final image on the creator's screen should correspond to their perception of the scene when the photo was taken.

If the intention is not a documentary representation of the scene then just about anything goes.

Ditto on the originality of a B&W rainbow: it becomes a halo of sorts.

Noise seldom bothers me.
Especially in a B&W image, I tend to just think of it as “grain” and that turns a defect into an artistic asset.
There are exceptions of course.

I like the colour version much more but to highlight the rainbow more, maybe a combination of the 2 images?

I used a black to white gradient on a layer mask with the 2 images stacked on top of each other.

This is the kind of thing I'm writing about in my far from finished piece on photography C&C.
I agree with Dan. Photography isn't one thing. If a photographer's aim is to try to produce an image as seen by the human eye, that's fine. It's an entirely OK aim for a photographer to have and they make their photographs accordingly.
However, there are many other possibilities when making photographic process images.
Then there is what the viewer brings to the experience. A shown image is a communication that triggers responses. At this point it is relevant to consider most of the factors in our response to art in general.

Very nice photo and back story.

For me though, the roof blends too much into the background because they both have similar lightness. I think more contrast between the roof and background help to hut stand out more overall.

Here I just darkened the background a bit around the edge of the roof and brought out a bit more texture and detail in the walls timber to also help the hut stand out more.

Anyway, as usual, just some food for thought.

Thanks Chris. We figure it had some important purpose for the farm business, close to the house. My grandfather's "office"? A storage area with better accessibility to the main road? Park of the dairy operation? Dunno. Still a mystery.

Thanks for thinking with me Mike! The roof is open to the rafters but with a small planked area over about 1/3 of the west side. Extra cedar shakes and some other old farm implements were stored there when I got it. The house and this outbuilding have the same high pitch pyramidal roof, though snowfall has always been rare and light here. It supposedly allows hot air to rise from living and work areas during hot summers. We know the underground section was used as a storm cellar, but the elaborate nature of the layout wasn't necessary for just that purpose, so there must have been another reason. That whole underground section became unstable in the 1950s and was sealed off, so no chance to explore it. My mother remembered it and some of the vaulting was visible when another portion of the tunnel collapsed when I was a young adult. Moonshining? Yeah. But my grandfather kept the still on the back 40, He and two neighbors and a couple of their sharecroppers tended it back there, and if the Government Men were in the area, they moved it across the fenceline onto the property of a man they didn't get along with. And the doorway is the white protrusion barely visible on the right side. The vaulting started there, and runs into the external wall of the bedroom. I salvaged some of the bricksand made a brick walkway to mark the lines of the old vaulting.

Thanks. Yours are subtle improvements that I think make it a better photo!

Thank you minniev.

I mainly dodged and burned using a separate layer in Photoshop Elements with some additional brightening of the top left window panel in the door.