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The Organic Fence Post
27 July 2021
When you plant an organic fence post, you don't need to sink it into concrete. It roots. And as a living thing, you don't have to replace it as often as even those pressure-treated 4x4-inch beams.
Fence Post. Olympus E-PL1 with 14-42mm II R kit lens at 34mm (68mm equivalent), f5.6, 1/80 second and ISO 200. Processed in Nik Collection Color Efex Pro after Adobe Camera Raw.
It's only prudent, though, to patiently wait for the post to mature. Otherwise, you may wake up one day to find your fence has been rearranged by the bulging post.
This shot was in deep shadow but the sun was in front of us, peeking through a hole just above the fence. We had to move off axis to avoid most of the glare but we couldn't entirely escape it.
When we wrang out the image in Camera Raw, we weren't happy enough with it to show it to you. The subject was amusing but the image did not draw you in.
So we resorted to Nik Collection 4.1's Color Efex Pro 4 to see what sort of recipe might make this a more interesting composition. The performance of the new version, on sale through the end of the month, is in fact significantly improved over v4.0 (and a free upgrade for v4.0 owners).
We found a few. The Polaroid, in particular, was fun. You can set the "smear" (and that seemed to help, actually). But we got over that quickly enough.
And, in the end, we brewed our own concoction.
As the screen shot above shows, we started with the Low Key filter, added the Glamour Glow (which we've never quite gotten over) and finished with Pro Contrast, enhancing the Dynamic Contrast.
That brought a little life to the subdued lighting in the scene without oversaturating it.
Saturation is the concrete of image editing. You can sink anything into it and it will hold it up.
But sometimes it's better to have roots holding things up. It's more organic, after all.