Day and Night, that’s the translation of the little sign next to these doors in Paris. They are the doors you can’t park in front of, something I thought Norm who runs the Thursday Doors community would appreciate, so I took the photo:
ISO 200 22mm f/13 1/30sec
When I was looking at the scene, I was also thinking about an upcoming selective color challenge. The blue sky reflected in the windows, I thought that would be fun to accentuate by desaturating the image but leaving the blue:
ISO 200 22mm f/13 1/30sec
It turns out that I didn’t want to leave the red out either. This edited version which leaves in the red and blue gives the photo a bit of a jewel-toned feel that appeals to me. When the original image was sitting waiting to be edited, I also thought I would crop it using the straighten feature. I gave that a try and was surprised at how much I did not like the straightened version. So, my final edit is cropped but not straightened.
Have you had that happen to you, an edit you think is going to be straightforward and an obvious choice backfires on you? Feel free to leave a comment below.
Cheers!
Photography Journal Blog 
well glad you thought of Norm with your doors here, but I am sure many more of of us will thank you for your fun doors – and reflections and colors – so much to enjoy day or night – lol
and enjoyed hearing about the edits – I guess it goes to show that thinking about an idea and then seeing it unfold are two different things – or can be
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Thanks, and that is part of the reason I wrote about the crop, it was just such a standout no when I saw what it would look like.
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got it….
🙂
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I do like the 2nd photo – it looks luminescent – and I LOVE the reflection of the sky in the upper windows.
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The sky on that day was just gorgeous!
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Well at least the motorists are respecting the sign and parking somewhere else 😉
Nice creative choices on the editing. It reminds me that I should try to experiment more myself.
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Yup! no fooling around there, I figure they probably have pretty strict enforcement right in that spot.
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Interesting door but I do love the blue sky reflected in the windows!
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Yes, the sky was really something else that day.
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Those blue reflections add so much life to the photo! Very nice!
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Thank you very much!
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My edits (for fun using pics art) sometimes happen like that. But more often I’m the other way; I want to make grand changes and then 1 tiny thing brings out the magic.
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That’s a very good point, sometimes it is just one small thing that really makes an image pop.
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It is such a lovely blue in the other windows, even in the non-edited version. Almost thought they were curtains for a moment there. Agree with you on straightening. Sometimes it just doesn’t work out and you don’t get that balance feel.
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Yes, it was a pretty building, but it was the reflection of the blue sky that actually made it beautiful in that moment.
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It was very good timing. Don’t know about you but sometimes when I straighten a photo I find that it loses its sharpness.
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That’s an interesting point. I’ll be honest, I’ve never really noticed a loss of sharpness.
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I usually take jpg photos that don’t alow a lot of editing. Would love to start shooting in raw 🙂
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The back and forth between RAW and Jpeg is a huge topic of conversation when it comes to photography. I always shoot in RAW and jpeg on my bigger camera, that way I have it. I’m also pretty ruthless when editing though if I don’t need the RAW version I delete it. There are a lot of situations where just a jpeg will be fine. This photo, for example, I took a bunch of shots, but this is really the one I want. I’ll keep this one. In a few months, when I’m ready to do a final clean up of this folder, the rest will be deleted.
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Amy, I’m always brought to thinking about the overlaps between writing and visual art/photography by your thoughtful questions. “Have you had that happen to you, an edit you think is going to be straightforward and an obvious choice backfires on you?” I know you think about the overlaps as well.
Your question reminded me of a time last week when I was editing or re-writing a story for my “Little Book of Lies” collection that I’m trying to finish as a manuscript. I wrote the story last year as a flash fiction and it didn’t quite work as flash, the ending wasn’t quite there. I still liked the premise – it is called “Mendacity,” about a young woman who has recently started constantly exaggerating to her friends over drinks about a new car, a promotion at work, etc., and can’t seem to stop. When I rewrote it, it turned into a literary musing on choices in her life, etc., which was okay, but I realized afterward I had lost the slightly supernatural feel of the original (that she was being possessed by a demon who made her lie). So, I restarted it again, and kept the opening section (about the lying and the demon), then I dropped into the demon’s voice, that it was haunting her because it was up for a promotion to full-demon, but that something goes wrong with its plan. Really ended up delightful and whimsical. I’m still not quite there but the new version has more of what I want in it.
🙂 Good question!
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That’s interesting because it seems like there was more than one story lurking there, something that I find to be very true with photography. You can have a single image, that depending on its edits, can tell more than one story.
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Very nicely stated! More than one story. I might think about that, something like a 3-part story for fun, one story from each of 3 doors. 🙂
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So, like a triptych, which is popular in altarpieces, particularly carvings or paintings. Perhaps the demon could be lurking in each of the panels and that could be what holds the stories together?
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Oh! Amy, love this direction. A demon! :). I’ll keep you posted!
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Have sent you a long e-mail on the topic 🙂
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Like places where one can park day or night:) Great find! Uh, when I need to straighten out a pic, it really NEEDS it:) Here the slant is so minor!
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I agree it seemed like such a minor “fix”, the results were terrible though, which was really interesting.
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I think I have had that problem but I can’t remember which photo it was that it had occurred with. I think that I wasn’t satisfied with neither the edited not unedited version so, knowing me, it’s probably one of the pictures that I went back and reshot.
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Yes, I know I have done that, gone back and just re-shot an image, sometimes that is the only satisfying solution.
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