Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #146: Focusing on the Details

Published on by Yinglan

This week, for Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #146, Patti has challenged everyone to focus on the details.

I spent a while pondering about this topic.

Focusing on the details, mmm… Focusing on details…

And then, like a lightbulb going off in my head, I got it.

As I probably mentioned in past posts, I love taking close-up photos. Close-up photos bring out a lot of the details that a pair of human eyes would had missed. It’s one of many reasons I love photography. There are things you can only see through a camera.

Like the ability to see black and white. I wanted to keep this photo in color but the green of grass would had been the foreground and the snowflakes would had been an afterthought. It took me a while to decide what to do but I ended up choosing a square crop and turning it black and white to hopefully bring out the detail of the snowflakes.


A few weeks ago, when I visited the Utah State Capitol, I was the witness of a bunch of kids having some bubble fun. I saw it as an opportunity to practice action photography. I only brought one lens on my trip that day – 17 – 70 mm lens – so I just had to work with what I got.

I was glad the lens was fast and sharp, otherwise, I would’ve missed the details.

I decided to do an image comparison for the image above – color vs black and white. I like the black and white version because I thought the color version felt too busy. I tried to apply the same edit – put a radiant gradient apply some dodge (brighten) around the boy in the middle to focus on him more – on the color version but it ended up looking weird.

By darkening the scene around the boy in the middle, like in a story, it provided a central character for the photo and I think that’s definitely one of the beauties of black and white photos.

21 thoughts on “Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #146: Focusing on the Details”

  5. Hi, Yinglan. That’s a great idea–to show us the same shot in color and black and white. I think the bubbles are really highlighted in the b & w. It also works in the first image to highlight the snowflakes. Nice work!

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

Anything you want to ask? Want to know?

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s