Image Re-visioning - What the Camera, Eye and Mind See

 I've taken hundreds of pictures of sunsets from this spot on the Lake Vermillion in northern Minnesota. It a ritual my wife and I do nightly maybe while were feeding the ducks too.

 

In all the years of shooting the same scene I've never seen my camera produced images like the top image. It lacks any of the cooler colors. My white balance was set to the full sun setting, and the 'cloud' setting produced the same image. I thought maybe it was just a setting I changed somewhere without knowing, but my wife's camera was doing the same thing.

 

Using Lightroom I was able to bring back some cooler colors by shifting  Temperature and Tint. I shifted the Temperature way to the cool side which normally would distort an image. As you can see in the image to the left it doesn't look great, but at least it isn't all yellow.

 

I could have played with it in Lightroom or Photoshop to bring it closer to what we saw, but what fun is there in that?

I'm seldom interested in recording just what nature provides, and skipped ahead to produce my revision. In typical style the image to the left is over saturated, and a little Photoshop warping was done to the water to create a bit more movement.

 

Also you might notice the dimensions have also changed. The image is a bit taller and stretched out which provided room for more water movement.

 

The image to the left is a complete departure from the others. The sun was blinding off of the water just before sunset, and it had been raining all that day with a misty feel in the air. I wanted to create the sensation of intense light breaking through the mist.

 

I'm glad that my camera normally captures a scene correctly, but it was rewarding in this case to explore my own sense of what I wanted to see.