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I read a wonderful quote today over at daily.lenswork.com by a photographer called Doug Ethridge.
The gist of what he said was that, as photographers, do we take photos 'of' things, or 'about' things?
I found that to be really profound, and chimed well with how I think about my photography as I'm always trying to convey mood in my pictures, rather than just pure fact. Hence all the photos shown here at goHOWiE.com have been post-processed in various ways to bring out some of the underlying emotion that I felt in the place and at the time I was there actually pressing the shutter.
Take this image of a small section of Autumn woodland, photographed at Loggerheads, about a 10 minute drive from where I live in North Wales.
Straight out of the camera the RAW file was factually correct, with colours and tonality rendered reasonably close to reality (whatever that is). However, the image at that stage conveyed none of the feel of acutally being there. The quiet mystery of the woods, the rich smell of loam and decaying leaves, the stillness and quiet of the windless afternoon, the odd mournful croak from the crows, hidden deeper in the trees. It was a picture 'of' the wood, not 'about' the wood.
To bring out the deeper meaning of this scene required a fair bit of trial and error in PhotoShop, but the effort was worth it as I now have an image that speaks to me 'about' that afternoon in the woods, rather than just reminds me of what Autumn trees looks like.
Filename - trees fence 01.jpg
Camera - Canon 5D
Lens - 100-400mm zoom @ 150mm
Exposure - 1/8sec @ f5.6, ISO800
Location - Loggerheads, North Wales
This image - 533x800px JPEG
Conversion - ACR & PS-CS2
Comments - Polarising filter used to enhance colours.
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