Playful Surprise

Last night, Sabrina Henry and I went to a unique location in Richmond BC, called Finn Slough. If you are into old and aged subjects, this is a very neat place to shoot. It is rich in history and there seems to be some interesting characters living there too.

Anyways, today I want to talk about the above image. It was a “happy mistake”, I think. The over-exposure was intentional. I had done what I don’t usually do just to see “what if?”. I had spot metered the fore-front building. I knew that if I metered with the matrix, it would cast a lot of shadow on the buildings. So, I “lived on the edge” and spot metered the building not expecting to get an over-exposed ugly image. When I first viewed the capture on the LCD viewer, I was not impressed. Actually, I almost deleted it on the spot but I didn’t.

When I got home and reviewed the images in Lightroom 3 the above image turned out to be a pleasant surprise. We had not shot a lot of images that evening because of the disappearing light and because we became involved in conversation with a local resident. Now, I know this area had been photographed before but I wanted to get my own perspective.  I like most of us photographers, didn’t want to shoot the same shot somebody else has already done. However, my other shots were exactly that, in my opinion. The same as others. Perhaps, this is why the above image stands out to me. It’s not HDR or B&W. In this case, I think the over-exposed capture works.

Now, I am going to step back a bit and talk about some of the questions that Sabrina has posed to me before we set out to shoot. I felt like I was being interviewed by the FBI with a bright spot light in a dark room. She asked tough questions that were really intended to help me understand myself and my art. Tough questions that help us grow as artists. I thank her for doing so. One of the things that came up was, “Why was I drawn toward a graphic type of image?”. I believe it’s because I think photographs are interesting when they don’t look %100 like a photograph. Or, perhaps, as Sabrina had suggested, maybe it’s because of my fine art background. Maybe.

OK. Now back to the above image. What I felt good about, is that when I first saw it in LR is that it looked like a water colour painting, a graphic,  even when straight out of the camera. I did very little treatment in LR. Added a touch of colour saturation and such but what really makes it look like a water colour, in my opinion,  is the reflections. It really was a pleasant surprise for me. It’ s not a masterpiece, a human element would have been nice to add but I like  it, regardless. I would like to think that I captured an image of Finn Slough that, perhaps, nobody else has. I am really glad that I took a playful chance of a spot meter instead of my usual matrix meter.