April Squares: Top Shots, Remembrance Sunday

ISO 25 f/2.2 1/192sec 4.2mm

Day 11, find other responses here. November 12, 2017.

Date and Location of Photo: Shot at the Remembrance Sunday, or Poppy Sunday service held in my village. The artwork for these yearly services are done by young people who live in the village and they are usually quite evocative, but I found this one particularly so.

Thoughts on the Edit: For this edit I applied a black and white filter with a red filter. I then added a bit of the red and green back into the image. This image was cropped tightly to show more of the detail of the art and to crop out the people standing nearby.

April Squares, an Explanation:

When Becky announced that the April Squares theme was going to be “top”, I thought it over and then sent her a message, then pitched my idea. She was open to my theme within the theme and the result is my response to the April Squares challenge.

I move a lot and I have a move pending. I’ve lived here in England for about four years and will be heading to the United States. Exact dates to be determined, given the current world situation, details have yet to be worked out. My April Squares is a “top shots” reflection on the last four years. Each square represents some moment or place that was meaningful to me. They are in chronological order moving forward in time. I’m attempting to post every day. All photos will be edited in Luminar 3. I hope you enjoy following along, I’ve enjoyed the process of creating. Your comments and thoughts are welcome below.

Cheers!

When It All Adds Up

A while back I blogged about this photo:

ISO 800 50mm f/13 1/160

Based on what I could find online, a few things like his name and date of birth didn’t seem to add up when you looked at this grave marker.  So I went back to the Cambridge American Cemetery and Memorial. The staff member who helped me was a bit surprised that I wasn’t researching a relative,but was more than happy to give me a hand in my research.  It ended up being pretty simple.  The Carlisle H. Reville whose grave I photographed, was Carlisle H. Reville Jr.  My search had been further complicated by the fact that the 1930 Census record was handwritten, and the later data entry spelled his first name wrong.

It’s easy to see why a mistake was made.

So, on the data entry portion of this page, he is listed as “Caulislo”, easy to see why.

In the course of my research I found out that Reville Sr. had served in WWI.  I also found out that Reville Jr. had first been buried at another cemetery but was moved here when this cemetery was established.  What I can’t find is a decent lead on the family, other than they were living in Pennsylvania in the 1930’s and 1940’s.  If you happen to know this family, I am more than happy to have them contact me if they would like a digital copy of the photo I have taken of their relative’s grave.

Since I was back at the cemetery, you know that I took some more pictures.  Here is one from that day:

The edited black and white version

I’ve edited this in Lightroom and using a black and white plug-in.  I’ll post the original below, but one of the first things I did while it was still a color version was to bring out detail in the shadows and increase the saturation in the blues and the greens.  It looks horrible in that state, but once it is converted to black and white it looks good again. Here is the original file:

The original

The subject is well suited to black and white I think.  I’ve included it in my portfolio at Picfair. Somehow the color version just seems to vivid for the subject matter.  What do you think?  Feel free to comment on my new photo or on the follow up from my older post.

Cheers!

Travel Theme: Connections

Today is Remembrance Day or Veterans Day and the poppy is a symbol for both.  I took a photo of some poppies growing in a field in Fundy National Park a few years ago and I decided to re-edit one of them for today.

ISO 200 135mm 0ev f/5.6 1/400

In order to get the original shot, which I will put at the bottom of this post, I did have to set the shutter speed fairly high because it was windy that day and I did not have a tripod with me.  It still turned out to be a pretty bright image.  In the version that you see above I have combined a few filters in Photoshop and I ended up liking this particular combination.

First under Filter I chose -Filter Gallery and then -Colored Pencil.  I chose a fairly thick stroke and a medium-light canvas.  From there I chose Filter again and then -Other  -High Pass then I changed my blending mode to saturation.  It was the last step that dropped almost all of the color out of the image in a way that I liked.

Here is the original image:

ISO 200 135mm 0ev f/5.6 1/400

Quite different isn’t it? Do you have a preference?

Sad that this poppy is connected with thoughts of so many who have died.  It is a beautiful flower.  This post was written in part in response to this week’s travel theme, connections.

Peace to all of you.

Cheers!