At last I’m getting round to systematically processing my images from my Rhode Island trip back in October. “Systematically” meaning that I go through each subfolder, make a first cull eliminating photos I definitely don’t want, then run the rest into Lightroom where I make the final choice about what to subject to some serious processing.
Here are two from Colt State Park. I start with these because they’re the only two that don’t feature stone walls; I was obsessed with stone walls on this trip.
First, this statue of Senator John Chafee of Rhode Island. It was erected after the Senator’s death in 1999. Before his time in the Senate, John Chafee also served as Governor of Rhode Island. He was clearly a very great man, for reasons that I won’t get into lest this post be regarded as politicized. Anyhow, he was also the father of Lincoln Chafee, who was Rhode Island’s governor for one term before the present governor, Gina Raimondo, took office.
It’s obvious from the above that I have no disrespect whatever for the late Gov. Chafee, but I’ve tried for years to get precisely this picture of the statue, with a seagull on his head and that beautiful tree. It just makes for an interesting composition. While I had the photograph in Lightroom I enhanced all the blacks to remove the details of the benches etc. at the bottom of the picture so that everything would look virtually silhouetted. I also slid the Clarity slider down to about -70 to remove any distracting detail from the clouds. Then after transferring it to Photoshop, I slid the Saturation slider all the way down to -100 to eliminate a distracting streak of blue cloud from behind the gull’s head. What do you think?
The second photo, for a change of pace, shows what’s called “the old bridge.” I walked around trying to find an interesting, uncluttered composition and decided on this view with some autumnal grasses in the foreground. I always seem to hit Colt State Park on cloudy-to-ominous days (probably because I always go in winter or autumn), and for this picture I decided to counteract that (as well as add to my growing collection of painterly photographs) by using one of the presets in the new Topaz Impression in Topaz Studio. One thing I like about the new Topaz Studio programs is the Opacity slide; if you discover a preset that you basically like but find it a bit exaggerated for your purposes, just slide the Opacity slide back until the effect decreases to a point that you like. That’s what I did here. Again, what do you think?
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