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Going Places
8 February 2017
Life, you may have heard, is a journey. That little tip is particularly likely to be hurled at you if you're in a hurry by someone who is not. But the inescapable fact is that we all spend a lot of our time traveling.
Going Places. From West Portal Station.
We're never where we want to be.
The digital photography equivalent of that is illustrated above. We took this shot of a scene seen by thousands every day on their way downtown. We liked it at the time because just as it promised departure, it focuses on the closed gates.
When we opened the Raw file to convert it into an image, about the only thing we felt had to be done was to correct the distortions from the wide angle lens. Which we've done in the shot above.
But we weren't there yet.
And we had no idea how to get from that rendering above to somewhere else. That's a good reason to run through a series of presets and Exposure X2 offers a very nicely implemented way to do that which not only illustrates each preset but also applies it in real time to the image.
Exposure X2. Sometimes a preset can be inspiring.
We tried that. We liked the Toy Model preset in the Bokeh group.
Toy Model. From the Bokeh preset group in Exposure X2.
But it was the change itself we liked, not the effect. The journey, as it were, not the destination.
In fact, we thought we might as well turn around and go right back home. Just take that color capture, that is, and make it a black-and-white image. All images start out as tonal captures, after all.
B&W Rendering. Our favorite for where it doesn't take you.
We felt that best expressed what the image had to say. It promises you a trip but you don't get to go all the way to color.
We cold have kept working on it, no doubt. But we had somewhere to go.