It’s October, so time for something spooky.
This was from one my earliest, best all-day photographic explorations. I went off to Ridley Creek State Park in Delaware County before dawn in the early winter because I had seen there was a dense fog forecast.
That yielded some of my favorite pictures I’ve ever taken, despite the fact that I didn’t really fully understand at that point that a low f-stop did more than just let more light into the camera and that I really should have brought a tripod with me. There are some shots now from that day that I wince at slightly because they could have been substantially better if I’d been more technically knowledgeable, but there are others that might have been worse if I’d known what I was doing—where the softness of a wide-open lens used on a landscape subject actually made the image rather dreamlike.
This shot, on the other hand, might have been the first time that I said to myself, “I have an idea”, that I didn’t just find a subject as it was and try to find the best compositional approach to it. What pleased me so much was that I had all the idea then—I said to myself, ok, let’s run up and put the empty swing in motion, then let’s get back and shoot with a shutter speed that will have it blurred. I thought, “That will look creepy”, and yes it does. Almost a bit too much.
So did this one, though here I decided to saturate the yellow and red in post-processing for effect.
I’ve come to dislike some kinds of over-saturated images, and especially a lot of high-dynamic-range (HDR) work, but at this point, I was sort of like the hominids in 2001: A Space Odyssey discovering the monolith—you can change just one or two colors? you can make a whole image lighter or darker? you can work selectively with just an object? I knew intellectually that this is what people meant by “photoshopping” but it was great to actually begin to understand what was possible with the tools.
Yep, creepy! I like it.