JULY 2019 THIS week's PICTURE

Grist Mill facade extended : photo by Malcolm Aslett

Is it just me? Do you take umbrage at certain natural occuring phenomena because you see them interfering with certain aesthetic choices that you would make in their stead? For instance, this is shooting against the light. The roof of the building is abutting a bright sky. Nature insists in presenting this to the lens of a camera in a manner that washes the edge in light. The compromise of the lens makes the contours and colours of the building thin as well as bleaching the sky. If you were drawing it, or painting it you would probably ignore the severity of the 'wash' and give a harder edge and colour to the affected area. Photographically it is a sensitve area to mess with and unless done carefully you can run the risk of making it look affected, drawing the eye in ways you don't want it to.

Joiner photography potentially provides some inroads to the issue, allowing you to take photographs with decent exposure on this 'horizon line' of object and sky. I have done it before in other photographs and there are a variety of solutions - solution being used loosely here as it is not about 'solving' so much as presenting alternative manners of representation. In this image instead of concentrating on the edge areas I partly avoided the issue by extending the facade by first using the photoshop content aware fill tool. I repeated it several times in certain sections and then tidied it up in parts using the clone stamp tool.

So the upper section should strike the eye as a bit of a puzzle. It doesn't make sense. The ramshackle nature of the building helps us overlook these oddities to a degree. The top roofline was put in at a random point because, well, just because. The softening of the tones and colours is still retained in the upper section, a slight ghosting which I darkened a little and then chickened out of adjusting to the same level of exposure as below. It's half a solution. The average spectator will see this and not worry about it, will assume this is 'reality'. But it isn't.

One of the things I like about a photograph of this nature is that others see it as a wooden building and I see it as an argument about a very specific event in photography - where the light of the sky floods the edge of a building and my futile attempts at fending off the inevitable. It's a King Canute thing.

And still I want to go back and make those shadows blacker and lines crisper. I'll leave it for now.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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