photography - church in the woods

Old Canadian Church before and after.

 This is an image from 2013. I found it on my website. For some reason I'd applied a technique to the image on the website called the "Orton Effect". It was way overdone so I trashed that image and went to search for the original. I found it on a hard drive and worked on it this morning.

This took sever al minutes. Maybe 30 or so.

Photography is not just about shooting a picture. Composition is maybe the most important thing, but a good composition is no good if you have an image that is blurred or has some other major problem that makes it unworkable. So assuming you have a good composition to work with and with no major "issues", to make it something worthwhile you will need to spend some time with it in Lightroom, or Camera Raw and then Photoshop.

This takes time. More time than you might imagine.

For every hour I shoot I typically spend two processing those images. There is one major exception that I won't go into here because I don't want to bore you to death.

Here is what I did on the above picture, as best I can recall. 

- There is (or was) graffiti on the far back window. I removed it.

- I was concerned that the top of the church was too close to the top of the frame so I need to add some sky and trees. I did that. 

- The additional sky and trees were not correct so I had to fix that.

- The composition was then "off" so I cropped it to something more normal.

- I worked on the sky trying to put some life there instead of it being just "gray".

- I worked on the overall color and tried to find some balance between darkness and brightness.

- The church was then too bright and need some sharpening so I did that.

- I added the ©David L Arment in and faded it in the left corner.

Looking at the picture now I maybe should have tried to do some lens correction because all the trees seem to be leaning inward. But I have spent all the time I'm going to on this image.

Was it worth the time. I don't know. Time will tell.

I do know that the original would not have had much of a chance. The "Orton Effect" image I posted had no chance of getting anyone's attention. Now at least the image has some chance of being seen.

The purpose of this post was to share with those of you who might have interest that it takes some time to get a good picture AFTER you get the picture taken. 

Thanks for your interest.