Take this shot, for example.
So, it's a lighthouse. In fact, it's the Bodie Island Lighthouse on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. The problem is, photographically speaking, it's in the middle of featureless nowhere and it's difficult to get a decent photo of it. I've been there many times and I have never felt that I captured it except in a postcard, snapshot sort of way.
The last time I visited a couple of years ago, it was a nice sunny day with interesting clouds and I had my polarizing filter with me, so I decided to get to the one spot that I could do something slightly interesting. Directly in front of the structure. All the bells were ringing in my head as I held the camera. Don't do it! that little voice was shouting in my ear. It's crazy symmetric.
But, I said to myself, it IS symmetric. That's the reality of it. So I brushed the little composition angel off my shoulder and pressed the shutter button.
When I got home and looked at the image on the computer, I was as disappointed as I knew I would be. It's a postcard again. At least this time I tried to use the symmetry to create some visual interest, but it was mild at best.
That's when I started having fun on the computer. A trick the old timer film guys used to use to get more dramatic landscape images was to use an orange or red filter over the lens. In fact, Eisenstadt said in his Guide to Photography that he always used an orange filter to darken the sky.
Why does a red or orange filter darken the sky? It's because the sky is mostly blue. The atmosphere scatters the shorter wavelengths (blues) but does not scatter the longer wavelengths (reds). So in the middle of the day, you see the blue light being scattered down to your eye, but not the red, so the sky looks blue. At the sunset, you are looking toward the red light which is NOT being scattered, and the blue that is being scattered it not coming toward your eye. So you see the warm colors of the sunset. The more dust there is in the air the more blue is scattered out leaving even more warm colors. But enough physics.
The point is, using a red or orange filter darkens the blue in the sky.
Now, we don't really use color filters over our lenses with digital cameras these days. But we can get the same effect by filtering the digital negative by lowering the output of the blue pixels. So in post processing I used a red filter and converted the image to black and white.
And, viola! A much more dramatic image emerged, as you can see here:
Yeah, now we're cookin' with gas! I know most of you don't know what that means, so look it up in the old folks dictionary.
Anyway, with the now very dramatic sky, the lighthouse stands out much more and the symmetry actually works in counterpoint to the random cloud patterns, which again have been emphasized by darkening the blue. This treatment seems to enhance the 3D effect, which is normally lost when taking landscape photos.
In spite of my breaking my own rule about symmetry, this has been one of my most popular photos.
So, I'm back to the old Ansel Adams quote: "There are no rules for good photographs. There are only good photographs."
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