Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #235: Shadows and Reflections in Monochrome

Published on by Yinglan

Happy Sunday! Patti is the hostess for this week’s Lens-Artists Challenge and we are exploring monochrome images that features shadows and reflections this week.

When I saw the topic from last week’s post, the image on the right immediately came to mind. It was an image I shot with my phone in January 2021. It was a spur of the moment thing and I knew I was turning it into a black and white. The feel of the photo just isn’t the same in color as in black and white.

A few days later, when I took my walk in the park, I saw the shadows of the trees and knew at once that it was something I must post for this challenge. Unlike the image on the right, which went through extensive editing in Lightroom, I just imported the image into Lightroom and applied a preset. The presets in Lightroom make the picture a little different, which I think it’s a good different.

I previously posted a color version of this photo. It’s from my December hike in the local wilderness area. This remains one of my favorite photos from that day. For this challenge, I re-edited the photo, converted it into monochrome while mostly tweaking the bottom left corner and the upper right corner with masks.

I find I can be quite fastidious when lines are present in a photo. In this case, it was imperative the first shadow be right at the corner. There was originally a partial tree trunk in the bottom right corner and I had to make sure it didn’t disturb the placement of the shadow when I cropped the image. In the end, I’m quite satisfied with the result.

Of course, what’s Shadows and Reflections without reflections? I recently tried to re-edit this image after losing all the original edits after transferring the file from my old laptop to my new one. I couldn’t get the result.

I find my edits of a photo will come out different each time just like there’s a thousand stories to be told with a photo. For me, it depends on the in-the-moment creativity. I have no idea how I edit this photo the last time but I’m glad I kept a copy of it because I like this edit.

19 thoughts on “Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #235: Shadows and Reflections in Monochrome”

  2. So true that each time we edit it’s a bit different Yinglan. I even find sometimes I try to recreate a previous edit and it’s never the same. Loved your trees especially the opener this week. Lovely monochromes, shadows and reflections

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. Thank you. I’m impressed by those who can recreate the edits. I think they must have a firm vision of what the image should look like in order to replicate the edit.

      Like

      Reply

    1. Thank you. It’s sure fun experimenting with Lightroom. I think the app on the phone is a little different than the desktop version, though. I’ll have to explore more on that.

      Like

      Reply

  7. Yes, a 1000 stories to be told with each photos. Your selections were great additions to the prompt. Don’t you love it when you just know you have a photo perfect for it? My favorite was the last one. I like the mood.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. Thank you. Oh, I absolutely love the feeling when I know I got the one for a challenge. I can just go to that photo instead of digging through my drives. It’s also funny that after taking thousands of photos over the years, I can see a challenge topic and instantaneously pull the photo from my mind.

      Liked by 1 person

      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