Sometimes it’s about post-production
In May of this year, we needed a break from our routine. We hastily threw together a trip to Fort Payne, Alabama, where we’ve stayed before. From a rented cabin in the DeSoto Falls State Park, we availed ourselves of the splendor of the woods, the river, the magnificent falls, and time filled with nothing to do. As our departure date neared, we saw that the weather was going to play bad. We didn’t care. If we spent five days on the porch of a cabin watching it rain, that was fine.
As it turned out, we did a lot of that. One day was nice enough to go kayaking, but every succeeding day had some rain in it. The result was that the river, slow and peaceful on our arrival, grew to rapid and rushing on our departure. The day before we left to come back home we hiked out to a waterfall and I grabbed this shot.
It’s a pretty enough picture as it is, giving a sense of the water’s motion. I could have enjoyed seeing this shot as a wallpaper on my computer screen. But then…
the image as shot from the camera
Topaz
I opened up Topaz Studio, which is a photo editing program I got when I purchased a Wacom tablet (serious bargain – practically a giveaway). It can be used as a plugin for Photoshop or as a standalone program. Topaz is becoming my go-to because you don’t need to know how to use Photoshop to use it. Photoshop is great, but a lot of times it’s just too complicated for what I really want to do.
I played around with the filters in Topaz and settled on the HDR filter. It really brought out the depth of — well, everything. I’ve since tried that same filter on several other photos, but I haven’t liked the results on all of them. HDR is something to apply with caution and great discretion.
Same image through a post-production filter
You can see how much deeper the leaves look, how much more vivid the flow of the water looks, how much clearer the rocks under the flow of the water appear.
The results
Let’s look at them closer together:
the image as shot from the camera
Same image through a post-production filter
The top image captures what I saw; the bottom one captures what I felt. There are some photographers who declare that there is no place for post-production in “real photography.” But photography isn’t just about showing what is there. It’s also about evoking emotion.
I liked it so much I had it made into a poster.