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The Hills Are Alive
19 July 2021
There was something about the hill on the other side of the road that appealed to us. We knew better. Whenever we take one of those golden-waves-of-grain shots they turn out looking like someone should call a gardener.
Hillside. Olympus E-PL1 with 14-42mm II R kit lens at 41mm (82mm equivalent), f8, 1/640 second and ISO 200. Edited in Capture One 21.
This time was different. As we looked at the thumbnail, we liked the abstraction the colors painted. The blue sky, the golden hill, the green foreground. It reminded us of those 1950s abstract expressionist paintings we like to linger around at SFMOMA.
So we pulled it into Capture One 21 and stepped through the dance, exporting a 500-pixel wide image. We brought that into Photoshop and resized it to 500 pixels deep for this piece. And took our little crop for the carousel thumbnail.
Then it occurred to us to prove color was essential to this image by converting it to black-and-white.
So we added an adjustment layer and fudged the hue sliders around to darken the sky, lighten the grain (well, grass) and darken the greenery. We liked it but it didn't have that swing.
The Black-and-White adjustment layer offers a popup of filters, so to drum the point home, we tried a few. The default, an infrared and the yellow filter landscape photographers use routinely.
The careful observer will notice that we have our version and three filtered variations presented to the left.
And after you've studied them a bit, you may agree with us that, while they vary tremendously, they don't quite sing like the color version.
We can't help thinking of Julie Andrews twirling around on another hill in the 1965 film The Sound of Music. In her autobiography she revealed that the film crew was in a helicopter whose backwash repeatedly sent her flying.
How many takes did she have to do with that noisy whirlybird blowing in her face?
She stood her ground and found the hills beneath her feet were alive with the sound of music.
But imagine if they'd had to use the live audio from that scene instead of recording her later in the studio? We would never have heard a thing.
Like this landscape without color. With the color, we found the hills alive, too. Singing to us.
