Abandoned on the Prairie

[LenR]

This abandoned homestead was captured on an early morning last week under skies clearing from rain the night before. These homesteads, in varying states of dilapidation, many dating from the early 1900's can still be found on prairie farms. As an incentive to attract settlers to the prairies, a 1/4 section of land (160 acres) could be had for the princely sum of $10 with the condition that a dwelling be built, the land be occupied for 3 years and at least 15 acres cleared for agriculture.

Abandoned Homestead by Len Reeves, on Flickr

[anthony 1966]

It is a very nice image, exposure is up where it is supposed to be. I think it has exclent potental as an artistic image. but I am a black sheep in a world of textbook perfection here.

[LenR]

Thanks Mark. Appreciate your comments......

[anthony 1966]

It would work very well in black and white.

[DanK]

Nice capture. I agree with Mark--I think B&W would be better here, as the core is textures, not the bright blue sky. I'd also crop the sky some and boost texture in the building--someting in the direction of this very quick edit:

[LenR]

Hi Dan, Thanks. This may well be an option to consider. A little embarrassed to say I have not done much B&W since 4x5 Tri-X days............

[DanK]

Len,

I haven't done B&W film in many decades. But if you have any postprocessing software, it's trivially easy to turn a color digital capture (or scan) into B&W. And it's actually more powerful because you can after the fact create effects that in the old days required having the correct filter on hand and thinking of using it. Lightroom makes this extremely easy, and its tools are very powerful.

In this case, because it's harder for me to import a photo posted here into LR, I did it in Photoshop. All I did was add a B&W conversion layer, with no tinkering at all, and then I added some texture. But if you wanted to do more, e.g., emulate a red filter to darken the sky, it's trivial to do.

Dan

[anthony 1966]

Hi Dan, Thanks. This may well be an option to consider. A little embarrassed to say I have not done much B&W since 4x5 Tri-X days............

It is well worth the time spent learning the processes.

[LenR]

Dan & Mark, I do indeed have the appropriate software for conversion to B&W and have experimented with it on occasion. For somewhere in the neighbourhood of a decade in the film days I did nothing but B&W. Perhaps time to rekindle that.

[MrB]

I agree with Dan's comments re. B&W and textures, and would go further with the crop to remove the clouds at the top which I find distracting. (A 2:1 wide image based on the Silver Efex High Structure preset works well for me.)

Philip

[anthony 1966]

To me the clouds are an important part of the image.If you crop too much all you have is the building nothing else. To my thinking the idea is to capture the scene,not just a single object. What would Ansel Adams had cropped the moon or the buildings out of Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico because they were deemed distracting?

[anthony 1966]

This is more like what I would do with it, I know it is probably under exposed and I didn't even look at the histogram but I am not going for a grade in a photography course.
B&Wre by Anthony Knittle, on Flickr

[DanK]

I don't think anyone here is looking for a grade, but some of us are trading ideas in the hope of doing better whatever it is we want to do.

Here's a somewhat more edited one, still not done. I emulated a red filter for the sky by pulling blue way down in the B&W conversion. I dodged and burned quite a bit, e.g., to darken the grass, which I found distracting, and to bring the roof closer to the rest of the building. I added texture (local contrast) using an unsharp mask filter set to 50 px, threshold 0. I increased midtone contrast on the building with a curve layer and mask. I used smart sharpening at the end.

[MrB]

To me the clouds are an important part of the image.If you crop too much all you have is the building nothing else. To my thinking the idea is to capture the scene,not just a single object. What would Ansel Adams had cropped the moon or the buildings out of Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico because they were deemed distracting?

A strange comparison there, Mark.

The AA image is a wide landscape photo of the Moon rising in a darkened sky over the still sunlit settlement, each part being integral to the whole. The image in Post #1 is a scene mostly of the building with a minimum of prairie; the building is clearly the subject matter of interest there - its construction and shapes, its surface textures interacting with light, and its time-passing deconstruction by neglect.

As such, it is a shot with great potential for mono (as shown in Dan's recent post) and, in my view, the clouds are largely irrelevant to that subject, with the exception of the smaller one above the left of the building which (provided it's not overdone) gives some balance to the composition.

But, as always, to each his own!

Cheers.
Philip

[Manfred M]

To me the clouds are an important part of the image.If you crop too much all you have is the building nothing else. To my thinking the idea is to capture the scene,not just a single object. What would Ansel Adams had cropped the moon or the buildings out of Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico because they were deemed distracting?

I think you need to look at what Adams did with that image, as by all accounts it was a "grab shot". The story goes (as told by Adam's son) that they were driving somewhere and Adams saw the scene; grabbed and set up his camera and was able to get one shot off before the scene disappeared (again, with an 8 x 10 view camera, it takes some time to take even a grab shot).

Adams printed that image over 1300 times. The only version I have seen in a gallery and was one of the later versions.

Here is the straight out of camera contract print of that scene:






And here is how Adams worked the scene in post (i.e. his wet darkroom).







A pretty aggressive rework of what he saw and he did remove a lot of clouds that were irrelevant to the image is was making. He did burn down that part because he believed they distracted from the visual story. The buildings and how they are lit bears little resemblance to what Adam's camera captured....

[anthony 1966]

I still like it better with the clouds.

[Manfred M]

I still like it better with the clouds.

I don't think that anyone is trying to tell you what you should or should not like, but rather giving you a different point of view on the image.

I personally find that the B&W version loses too much of the golden grass. I do find that the crop is too tight and that the higher up clouds are distracting. So taking a few minutes in post and being a bit more aggressive gets me this version...





By no means finished, but the direction is where I might go if this were my image.

[anthony 1966]

I didn't say that.

[DanK]

my second (#13) and Manfred's (#17) make a very interesting comparison, IMHO. I once suggested that a photo club have an event where everyone presented images that they thought were good in B&W alongside the color version, appropriately edited. Not everyone was as enthusiastic as I was.

[Manfred M]

my second (#13) and Manfred's (#17) make a very interesting comparison, IMHO. I once suggested that a photo club have an event where everyone presented images that they thought were good in B&W alongside the color version, appropriately edited. Not everyone was as enthusiastic as I was.

One of the photo clubs I belong to has a monthly feedback group. The session rules are that members must show both the original and the finished image. The moderator will make some quick adjustments to the images (using Lightroom) to help the attendees visualize what the suggestions made to the image could look like.

It can get a bit embarrassing when group members prefer the original to the processed image...