Playing with a photo

Haggis

http://i1255.photobucket.com/albums/hh633/Nikonhaggis/Nikon hdr/bruce_Detail_zpsm9d3keof.jpg

Try making a photo into something else. Having fun, or is this photography?

bruto

It's all photography. Remember that Ansel Adams, noted for his apparantly straight pictorial work, was a diligent and skilled darkroom technician, and every one of his images is manipulated.

I'm not crazy about all manipulations, and nowadays some of them seem too easy and become clichés, but there's no real difference of anything but degree between applying a little sharpening or changing the white balance, and photoshopping a picture to kingdom come. A photograph is a photograph.

For much of my photographic life I've shot slides, and the habit of getting just what you are after right out of the camera has tended to linger, but in earlier days I did a lot of black and white work in the darkroom, and enjoyed playing with contrast and exposure, dodging and burning, and whatnot. I was never very good at it, but I certainly was not a purist. The black and white work you show seems rather familiar, as I often sought a high contrast look without a lot of mid tone grays.

Haggis

I took this one on a boring day weather wise. Itt is my local Castle, Dumbarton Castle for history buffs.
http://i1255.photobucket.com/albums/hh633/Nikonhaggis/Nikon hdr/DSC_0895_Localtone IR_zpsl5gkchlc.jpg

bruto

I got a brief look at the later one before my computer started locking up from bad scripts and popups. Anyway, it looks interesting, and I'm guessing a lot of red filtering to get those clouds, but it looks as if the clouds are not so bad to start with.

I was in Alaska not long ago, and although the scenery was grand, it was hard to get a good sky. Much of the time, the sky is a light gray entirely devoid of detail, and aside from everything else, it pushes the envelope of dynamic range. You might expect a light gray sky to make things easier, but in fact it's quite bright, while the landscape is relatively dark, and as a result it's very challenging to get a good landscape without blowing out the sky.

So uninteresting or not, be glad of those clouds!