Roadside consolation

[ELAY]

Photo of a processional chapel on a small Island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, taken just after dawn.

I have always liked shots taken into the sun, but never had much success with them. The colour version of this has some ugly yellow banding around the bright spot; the conversion hides it mostly.



D40; 18-55mm kit lens zoomed out to 18mm; f/11; 1/100; polarizing filter. BW conversion using channel mixer 45 green/45 red/10 blue; little bit of gold tinting added.

Thoughts, especially on the "shooting into the sun" aspect?

EL

[RexK_Cozumel]

This is a great shot elay. I am with you in that I have always liked shots like these. The conversion to B&W looks very good. just out of curiosity can you post the original up? Only thing that would make this picture perfect IMO is to clone out the curb/road in the bottom right corner.

[ELAY]

Here's the original right out of the camera basically, or at least as close as I could get (I shot it RAW, so I guess something likely happened to it in my converter). The banding doesn't show up much here, but it leaped out if I touched any contrast or colour tools.



It's interesting you should mention the road, Rex. I took a bunch with and without, and as you see I cropped most of the road out of this one, though more to move the church to the right than for anything else. Part of me thinks the road makes it more interesting; the other part agrees with you.

EL

[RexK_Cozumel]

I think that if there were more of the road and less field putting the church on the left side of the frame it would be ok as well. but with just that tiny bit of curb it looks a little out of place. I am torn between the b/w and the color tho. The colors came out really nice... Did you do any with a fill flash to get some detail out of the grass that is blacked out by the shadow?

[ELAY]

I put another shot of this church in Landscape, in colour, processed to be a bit lighter and with the chapel blocking the sun, here.

In this version I was going for sombre and for contrast, so I let the shadows go really dark.

And no, I didn't shoot any fill into the shadows. Good thought.

EL

[thekevinmonster]

I think I like the black and white version better (or is it sepia?). It seems to me that the color in this case isn't as important as light and shadow, and so taking the color out means you don't get distracted by it.

I also like the lack of detail in the shadow areas. I'm not fond of those perfectly-lit shots with all the HDR stuff making every shadow burn away like a nuclear bomb went off... I like the flare, the deep shadow in this shot.