This was the result of an early experiment with all the parameters that Lightroom lets you work with.
It was taken on a foggy walk in the first week where I committed to shooting on full manual and was learning to really love the outcomes.
In compositional terms, it feels like it’s slightly short of the mark. I had recognized that the utility wires going off into the forest and the fog was interesting, but the pole neatly bifurcates the frame and leaves the right third of the image kind of off on its own. Today, I’d shift left and give the utility lines a deeper path into the background of the overall shot—though maybe not if that cost me that interesting sense that they connect to the large tree in the center-right of the composition.
I know I wouldn’t quite fiddle around with hue and white balance to turn the fog into such an otherworldly turquoise, but maybe that’s a flaw in my current aesthetic thinking. It is, once again, the haunting impact of naturalism on photography taking hold here. If you saw a painting that made that shift in color and mood, you’d likely not think twice, if there was a coherent visual imagination behind the shift. With a photo, we tend to think: that’s the software talking, not the person who took the shot. Which is in its way right. I learned about white balance and color first through the interface of a software application rather than intellectually through the guidance of a teacher or book. I don’t think that’s ideal, because it deprives you as you learn of an understanding of what exactly is going on. Only after a lot of work do you begin to form something like a fully-realized conception of why doing this nets you that. Though on the other hand, when that realization starts to take hold, it’s profound and experiential rather than a learned principle that you study and absorb before you actually have a functional practical grasp of what the principle means.
In any event, it’s still an image I like, despite knowing what I didn’t know when I made it. There is something about the coolness of the turquoise, the depths, that makes the forest feel as much like an ocean—inviting but also dangerous. Your eye follows the wires into a deep where you’d like to go but might drown.
I would buy the book of which this is the cover photo, Tim. Takes me somewhere contemporary fantasy.