Happy Sunday! This week, Patti is hosting Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #277 with a theme of Empty Spaces.

Although I would personally define “Empty Spaces” as negative space, I love the definition from Adobe’s website as cited from Patti’s post:

…Although the viewer’s eyes may focus on a central figure, they can’t help but notice the large section of emptiness that surrounds and defines that figure. So, essentially, that emptiness (in whatever form it takes) gives definition and emphasis to the subject.

From the Adobe website.

Though a little busy, I would say the background of this image is considered an empty space. I was experimenting with my new 40 mm micro lens with this image in mid-October, trying to figure out the appropriate f-stop. So far, it’s been a bunch of hits and misses. This lens is tricky with it being a micro (macro?) lens. I’ll need more tutorial and practice but I think this image came out pretty good.

This is from the cruise I went on while I was in Osaka in September. Even at 400 mm, this lighthouse still looked like a dot in the distance. The only way I could make it bigger was by cropping. I have been trying something new with my photo editing ever since I returned from Japan.

Because I kept encountering gray skies, each time I autoed the blacks and whites levels in Lightroom, it brightened the image so much that it’s blinding. I always had to tone it down with some other method but I discovered I quite like the sky washed out like this as opposed to the gloomy sky.

I browsed my archive all the way back to 2022 for this challenge. This image caught my eye. It’s from October 2022 and my first thought was What was I thinking?

I had a 18-400 mm lens, why didn’t I take a large shot of the moon and then do an overlay in Photoshop?

I was probably in a hurry, like a “snap-and-go” kind of hurry. It was a day trip with my mom and her sister and BIL. They are always in a hurry. I don’t know why. If my aunt had not told her husband to stop the car, we would had been zooming through the narrow roads of the canyons without getting a single shot.

Despite not “thinking” at he time, I think this came out pretty good.