Sometimes, while reviewing files, I come across an image that fails to work for me but which, on closer scrutiny, offers the possibility of a crop and the chance to ‘play around’ with it. More often than not, interestingly, this is a colour image and therefore ‘out of my comfort zone’. My ‘notes in passing’ are predominantly monochrome and that is the setting I use on my camera by default.

Both the above images were made one the same day, at a car park that overlooks the Gulf of Thailand. I was waiting for the sun to rise fully and had a walk around to kill some time. The first was part of an image that I simply flipped upside down because the shapes, for me, worked better as a composition. The second was taken on a raised pavement that ran alongside the parking spaces; it had rained during the night and a large pool of water had formed at the point where the footpath turned a corner, catching the early light. It was a reasonably simple job, using Photoshop, to turn the photograph into something I could live with.

Talat Noi, one of Bangkok’s oldest communities, is one of my favourite districts and is the subject of an ongoing project (there is a blog on this page about it). The image above was made through the doorway of a building that was being renovated. The main change I made was to shorten the broom handle until it, in my opinion, worked with the composition. Artistic license…

I don’t have a macro lens, but my lens will focus very closely and on occasion I have experimented with very close up images. The two photos above were made using this and on these I specifically went out to make colour photographs as a little project. The tendrils in the first were barely a millimetre wide. The close focus and low light combined to give me only a couple of points were the image is sharp and I brightened the highlights at those points. I removed most of the background, leaving a little detail which I felt complemented the design. Likewise, the highlights were selectively brightened in the second image. It’s about the colour red.

I was sat outside the house one early morning when I noticed the intense shadows on the wall caused by a tree bathed in the warm light of the sun, which had just risen above the rooftops of surrounding houses. The was a gentle breeze and the shadows moved, almost imperceptibly, as I watched them. I thought: ‘how great it would be if you could capture that as a painting’. So I tried to realise what that may look like and this was the result.

Finally a crop from a photograph that I would normally have made in black and white. The complementary colours used by the artist produced a stunning effect, however, and I didn’t resist the temptation to alter my settings for a moment. On review, I thought there was an almost collage effect, that the window looked disassociated from the wall. It was a simple task to mask the image – window frames are easy, with their straight lines – and attempt to emphasise this effect. Whatever, there is a lot going on in this picture.

Interestingly, I note that all of these images were taken in 2017. I’m still playing.

Thanks for visiting my blog. Usual Olympus OMD and Zuiko short zoom used for all, for those who are interested.