A S C R A P B O O K O F S O L U T I O N S F O R T H E P H O T O G R A P H E R
Enhancing the enjoyment of taking pictures with news that matters, features that entertain and images that delight. Published frequently.
23 May 2022
Derrick Story's piece today on What to Do With Rejects made us think. These days it's easy to acquired rejects. Burst mode on a phone is as reject factory itself.
But when it comes to the Unfortunate Single Frame, we tend to cling tenaciously to our rejects. We may not be able to do anything with them today but there's always tomorrow.
And tomorrow may bring some software enhancement or just a different skill level or artistic approach that makes today's reject acceptable.
Friday, for example, we rejected this image from our slide show of Twin Peaks.
But there was a reason we took the image. Something about the scene appealed to us. Maybe not enough to add it to the other images in the slide show but standing alone and treated differently from how we edited the slide show Raws, we might make something of it.
So we gave it a shot this morning.
The first thing we did was minimize a big flaw.
And that flaw was confusion. There was just too much detail in the original portrait capture, shown to the side as the camera's flat capture.
Too many rocks, too much grass, too many trees to see the forest.
So a crop was in order. We wanted to see if we could hone in what attracted us to this scene in the first place without overwhelming the viewer with detail.
We tried it in monochrome and colorized but, in the end, the color version, slightly desaturated from Adobe Landscape, took the cake.
Or, you might say, we rejected those other versions.