Ian Furniss Photography » Blog Archive

Variations On A Theme

After speaking a little the other day on post-production and choosing the best method for what you want to convey rather than sticking slavishly to one set routine, I wanted to expand that topic a little further with these variations. One of the things that I enjoy about writing this blog is that it gives me the chance to experiment and do things I wouldn’t normally do when aiming for a commercial market. Unless it’s for prints, most of the work I do is concerned with a more faithful reproduction and so this helps feed the slightly wilder side of me.

This is another of the shots I took walking along the canal the other night. There were two things that particularly grabbed my attention as I walked up to the bridge, the first was the reflection of the trees in the water, the second was the idea that beyond the bridge was another world and I was catching my first glimpse of it. With the former idea, using black and white is one good way to show this.

By using B&W, the eye is less distracted by colours that may other wise complicate things and the scene appears as a whole, albeit with a lead line to the centre. That lead line is enough to draw the viewer towards the centre, but once there, the eye can wander around without feeling quite as contrained as it would if the image were in colour as below.

In this image, the ‘world beyond the bridge’ is is a lot stronger, the lead line more dominant, but at the same time the eye is getting pulled away by the greenery and bluebells to the left. The problem here is increased by the colour of the bridge acting as a barrier between the two points and that gives the whole image a quite jerky feeling. If you can imagine, had there been a thick line of green leaves running along the edge of that left bank and connecting the two points, that would cure the problem and create a lot smoother image.

One compromise solution is a combination of the two images, the black and white and the colour, and this, whilst not being a faithful reproduction of the original, is probably about as clsoe as it gets to reproducing the scene as it was, whilst still offering an individual take or interpretation of it. Certain elements are desaturated enough to take away their distractive nature, and the end result is more like a faded photograph.

Variations of any scene are as numerous as you wish and limited only by your creativity, but this last version that i’ll put in, is a combination of a number of different principles.

Sticking with black and white, you still have the ‘world beyond the bridge’ (emphasised by a localised/masked curves adjustment), but this time the image is reversed horizontally. Personally I always favour left to right lead lines as the usually feel much smoother although I do use right to left sometimes, as in the original shot. Taking it left to right in the foreground gives a completely different feel for me that in this particular image throws my mind out slightly when I then need to go right to left as my line of sight passes beyond the bridge. It feels like i’m concentrated purely on the left side of the image and anything to the right is almost completely ignored. Another reason why this has happened for me, is that the image has now been closed off due to what is known as gestalt perception. Gestalt perception causes my mind to recognise the right side of the bridge and its reflection in the water as the number 3. Once it’s done that, it doesn’t feel the need to go further. It sticks a kind of mental barrier there that I need to consciously look past if I want to see anything.

It’s a useful technique to bring into play if shutting off a part of the image is your intention although in this case i’d personally see it as a reason to get the crop tool out as the redundancy would serve no essential purpose. One thing I should mention, if you do decide to flip an image like this, is to pay attention to the numbers or other such indicators. P1 instead of 19 would probably be a lot more distracting than the bluebells ever were!