Kewaunee Lighthouse in Black and White
This is one of the images I took while we were on our trip up north. The lighting on the day I shot this was horrible. It was hazy, the sky was washed out and the light was very harsh. The only reason I took the picture was to have an image for the lighthouse collection.
But once I saw this image at home, I was very intrigued by the person on the end of the pier fishing and sitting on that bucket. I cropped the image vertically so that the person would become more a part of the scene. And then I left the picture alone. Didn’t think anymore about it, until last night.
Last night I was in a black and white mood. I was looking through old images and hoping something would jump out at me. Then I remembered this shot. I loaded it into Photoshop and began to work on it. Almost from the start I had a nostalgic feeling about this shot. It just felt old to me. Something about the lighthouse and that fisherman. This image could just as easily been taken a hundred years ago in 1909.
So as I worked on the image I kept that old feeling in me and decided it needed an aged look to it. I don’t normally add grain to my images, but in this case it called for it. I feel the grain adds a texture that brings out that old feeling even more. And even though I often used vignetting in my black and white images, normally you don’t ever know it’s there unless you’re looking for it. But again, in this case the heavier vignetting was called for. For one thing, that washed out sky needed something in it. But the vignetting also adds to the old feel.
I never know how I feel about an image that I create at night until I see it in the morning. I think this one looks better this morning than it did last night. I’m pretty proud of how this image came out. This image shows once again that you should never give up on an image. Even though it didn’t turn out like you wanted it to originally, there may be something beautiful waiting to emerge when the time is right.
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