There’s something not quite right about this photo. From a compositional standpoint I think it’s great, with a colorful coneflower right in the center, two more furled flowers framing it on either side, and some blurry spots far in the background adding a splash of light as well as depth. Not bad, right? But beyond all of that lies one critical problem: the colors are…off. The yellow petals are too bright, the purple center of the flower has a weird tin to it, the green stems on the sides are kind of pale and sickly, and the entire composition seems like it was over-processed by a bad mobile phone filter. It almost makes my eyes hurt just to look at it, and yet, here it is–featured as this week’s photo here on Weekly Fifty. So what’s the deal?
To start with, let’s take a look at the original RAW. Or, rather, a screenshot of the “Before” view in Lightroom, with relevant metadata in the top left corner.
It’s an odd amalgamation of colors, with the purple top of the flower sticking out like a sore thumb–literally. It’s the color of a skin bruise, and I don’t exactly mean that as a compliment. The orange and yellow petals in the foreground are overexposed, and the entire image has sickly pallor to it that I find strange and, to be honest, a bit disconcerting. No matter though, these kinds of issues are easily remedied when shooting in RAW…or so I thought. However, when I imported this into Lightroom and started working with the usual set of sliders, nothing really seemed to work. I couldn’t get the white balance right. The yellows were uncooperative. Even the cropping wasn’t working out. No matter what I did with the whites/blacks/highlights/shadows it just didn’t give me any good results and the color grading, saturation, vibrance…nothing worked!
I often get to the point in my editing where I feel like I’ve got a result that’s good enough and I don’t really want to work with the image anymore. Most of the it’s because I’m happy with the result and any adding minutes or hours of additional tweaking won’t really pay off by giving me that much of a better result. But in this case I honestly just kind of gave up. I don’t know what happened, but something about the original composition did just not lend itself to a final finished product.
So I’m sharing it here not because it’s a great image, but because it’s an example of my learning process as a photographer. Even though in a cold, objective, mathematical sense all the stars lined up just right with this one…from an artistic standpoint it didn’t work out at all. And that’s OK. Sometimes it’s good to have those kinds of images; they can teach us a lot more than we might realize.
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