Revisiting Older Photos from Another April

It has been rainy for a few days, and since I also feel restricted by lockdown, I have taken to re-editing old photos. Mainly, since this is April, I have been opening April files from other years. I found significant local flooding just two years ago, which I put in our local FB as a reminder, but I didn't reprocess them. Then, I came to a folder from way back in 2015. We were at the cottage with our in-laws. The ladies went out for the day, so my brother-in-law and I hit the rural roads with our cameras.

On a very rural road at the far end of a property, we saw a truck embedded in the Precambrian rock. There is also a bicycle on a ledge (look to the left) and a tricycle below at ground level along with some Christmas decorations. The original photo was vertical and covered a lot more area from bottom to top. I cropped deeply and converted to b&w. In this case, I think monochrome allowed me to emphasize the textures better.

Later along the same road, I took this detail photo of a rusty latch on an old shed. In the new edit, I opted to render the background boards to b&w but left the colour in the latch, I also cropped this one but not nearly so much. I had the latch more centered in the original but cropped a bit off the top and right to get it into this offset position which I find more pleasing.

Finally, for today anyway, I converted a photo of a disused Community Centre into b&w and also cropped some from the left as there were just more trees over there, and I wanted to bring greater focus to the building.  I love the result. Oh . . .  I almost forgot to mention that I swapped the sky which was just a solid blue in the original version. I just wanted a little more interest up there. I had almost forgotten that I had done this.

Not so very long ago, I had no inkling that I would become so interested in b&w photography, but I have been finding that I can often push the editing more than I can in colour and focus , and at least sometimes draw greater attention to where I want it to go. I have been enjoying the process.

All three of these photos have been cropped in the re-editing: the first one of the truck in the rock especially. I like to think that these six years later my vision in-camera has improved and that I would now take photos that would require less cropping afterward. However, although one can sometimes crop in camera, it is less natural and takes extra steps because the camera defaults to a traditional 4x6 format, like you see in postcards.

We both took many images that day, and I most certainly liked a lot of them and how I edited them six years ago, and I see no need to re-edit them. But going back to then from now, gave me a different perspective on some of them.

Largely for my own benefit, here are a few links to blog posts from back then. Both of these posts centered on photos of a single piece of heavy machinery that we came across elsewhere on the same road.

Working the Scene and Working the Darkroom

I was really surprised to discover that I made a slideshow of the machinery photos and actually went as far as including a soundtrack: The Champion in a Slideshow.