Threefold thanks

[shewhomust]

On a point of etiquette, I hope it is in order to offer this conjoined 'thankyou' to the people who said kind things about the photo in my previous post.

I might just have brought myself to say a simple 'thank you' to each of you, but then I wouldn't have gone on to explain that it's one of those photos where the thing that pleases me in the end product is not at all the thing that pleased me in the scene I was trying to photograph.

I'm happy with the symmetry, and the crispness of the detail, but I'm aware that I haven't really caught the quality of the light at all...

The light had been changeable all day, mostly soft and - not grey, but cloudy, and then the sunshine breaking through. We reached the Curling Pond mid-afternoon, but it felt later, the light was almost opalescent, as it is sometimes on summer evenings, and it was that quality, filtered through the still bare branches of the woodland, that made the scene special. As I got my camera out, it clouded over, but we sat for a little, and just as we were moving off it brightened again, and I stopped (durham_rambler was very patient about this) and took this picture.

Which is really too much to say three times. But I'm glad you liked it.

Comments

[athenais.livejournal.com]

It is a lovely photo with many fine qualities, including the light, although it did not capture the light you saw, apparently. It's striking, though, exactly as is.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

It's truly magical.

Nine

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

With your very own brand of domestic magic; I'm sure there are curling ponds in Cloud...

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

Often some of the best photographs do not capture the scene exactly (and cannot, because your eyes and brains see - and edit! - things differently to emulsion and pixels, and light passing through the lens of the camera is not changed in the same way as it is passing through the lens of your eye.) It's very frustrating, if what you want from the scene is a memory. Of course, you could try playing around with filters in a photo-editing program to see if you can get the effect you remember... and always remembering that both the white balance and the colour intensity settings (if your camera has the latter) will affect the final result.

However, when the result is as good as the photo you posted, it's best to accept it. It's a lovely photo.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

It hadn't occurred to me to try editing; and I'm sure you're right, that although this is a photo and not my memory, it ain't broke and I shouldn't try to fix it.

(I do edit, but minimally - crop, brightness, contrast, and that's about it - and not on this photo, which is resized but otherwise just as it came out of the camera).

Thank you for including it in your gallery. It feels very domestic in scale among all that epic grandeur - but that's partly because I know how small-scale the setting is.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

That's as much editing as I have been doing myself. However, I am now in the process of learning - or trying to learn - more detailed techniques, because sometimes you do want to edit things out of a picture. (Dracopup has an appalling habit of sneaking into the bottom of mine.)

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

There are techniques I'd use preparing a picture for use on a web site which would feel like cheating if I applied them to one of my photos. How odd...