A few weekends ago, I spent a few hours sitting before my laptop with Adobe Lightroom Classic opened on the second monitor sorting photos. I knew I had a lot of photos but I was not expecting to be almost 5,000 photos. How did I manage to take so many photos and not remember that I took them?

In last week’s Lens-Artist Challenge, I mentioned my old Sony Mirrorless camera has a moldy sensor. Well, that’s why. The spots become more apparent in bad weather and long exposures. The thing is, I love bad weather photos. They present a level of drama which you can’t find on a sunny cloudless day. To alleviate the spotty problem, I did the only thing I could – crop and/or turn it black and white. Some photos are also just not that memorable in color.

You can clearly see those pesky dark spots in the picture on the left. It took a lot of cleaning up and adjustments in Lightroom to arrive at the image on the right. Yes, the water is really that blue.

Even though I didn’t have to do much spot removal on this photo, the black and white version somehow feels more interesting than the original.

This photo was memorable but it wasn’t my favorite even though I thought so when I took it. I felt like there wasn’t enough drama in the sky and there wasn’t enough emphasis placed on the tree in the middle.

I shot this photo with my phone last weekend. I’m starting to get the hang of phone photography and I’m so glad my phone allows me to shoot in RAW so I can edit my photos in Lightroom. I absolutely love the black and white version of this photo. It was more or less how I saw it at the moment with the sun shining and the tree’s shadow accentuated. It’s one of my favorite photos so far in 2021.

Lens-Artist Challenge