Moulins de Razel in sepia

[Chataignier]

The mill is ancient, I thought sepia suited it rather well.

[Round Tuit]

It does.

[Manfred M]

I agree. The sepia works well with this scene and gives the image a "period look". A pleasing subject and setting, for sure.

I find that the sky is a touch "hot" and some of the textures could be brought out a bit more. I did a bit of dodging and burning to see how that would look...


[url=https://www.flickr.com/gp/52469432@N05/6d697133is]

[Chataignier]

I like that a lot Manfred, wish I'd seen the potential.

[Manfred M]

I like that a lot Manfred, wish I'd seen the potential.

I spent a lot of time (and money) paying an expert to teach me that... And then it took even more time (and patience) to learn how to become competent in figuring out what works and what doesn't.

If you look at the great masters, past and present, they spend most of their time dodging and burning to "calm" the image and visually guide the viewer through the images. Bright areas that draw too much attention need to be burned down. Areas that hide their textures often need to be dodged to open up the shadows.

When Ansel Adams tells us that he spent all day in the traditional darkroom making a print, making the print, he was dodging and burning almost all of that time. If you look at Cartier-Bresson's print maker, he was doing exactly the same thing, without any specific direction from the photographer. Karsh's colour printmaker (the expert I studied under) told me that it took a full week to do a colour print, as global and local colour decisions added significantly to the amount of work to get the final (large format) print made.