This past weekend I participated in a photography challenge over at light stalking (if you are a photographer, you should check them out). The topic was texture… no other explanation, just texture. The subject got me to thinking about how I could make the viewer feel the the subject of the photograph just using his/her eyes. There are a lot of ways to make us feel the emotion in a photo. That is not what I was after. I wanted the viewer to know exactly what the object would feel like, by just looking at the image.
I am visiting my parent's home in Atlanta this week and they are collectors of antiques and have a wonderful yard filled with plants and stone walls and ponds, so finding a subject would be a process of narrowing down the great candidates that are available.
In the end, after trying out several shots, I settled on this image of my grandfather's whistle sitting on a stone path. I liked the way the texture of the stone path contrasted with the rusted chrome of the whistle.
The image is certainly interesting with its shallow depth of field and the vibrant color of the rust. But can you feel the rust in your mind after seeing the image? I wanted to experiment a little further and to be honest, I thought that the color of the rust was just a little to close to the color of some of the stones and the similarity was a little too distracting for the image I wanted.
When I need to have my subject stand out from a busy background or one that has similar colors, I have a couple of options at my disposal. I could use a shallow depth of field or blurring the background in post processing to make the subject stand out. The DOF is already pretty shallow and about right for what I wanted, so I opted for another solution and switched to black and white, hoping that the resulting contrast between light and dark would make my subject pop and place the focus not so much on the whistle, but on the rust itself. The final result is the following B&W conversion.
I adjusted the color channels to filter out most of the blues in the image to create the final contrast. I think the result is successful. The texture of the whistle really seems to pop, giving a really grainy feel. What do you think?
Tim
tim mcmurdo 