This is another one of my revisited files from a week in Maine some years ago. During the pandemic lockdown and its aftermath, unable to really get out and travel and shoot, I spent a lot of time going through my files of personal work with a fresh eye. And that eye decided that a lot of images worked best in black and white. This is one.
While it is from the Maine coast, there is no water in the image, these rocks being a little bit away from the shoreline, at least at the time I was viewing them. And while I had always been pleased with the lines of the composition, it wasn’t until I exploited one of the fantastic parts of the digital realm that it all came together.
In the days of film, one could use a filter to alter the tonality of a scene, but only one filter at a time. But with digital, you can choose any area of the color spectrum to adjust, and really accent or diminish that particular area. Whatever the composition of these rocks is, they responded to the aqua, blue, cyan, red and magenta sliders being pulled all the way down, while the orange and especially the yellow sliders were moved forward, which lightened the tones in the center rock and darkened the neighboring ones. And I was a little surprised to find that this was the only exposure I made of this scene. The photo gods were with me that day. As I mention a lot, I am a big fan of line and texture, and this has that in abundance.
