Feel, Touch, Love

Have you ever taken a picture and then looked at it on your device and thought - “that is not what it felt like when I looked at it”? The reason you were likely drawn to wanting to take the picture, was because the scene emoted something for you. It called you, caught your eye and stirred something in you that said - “I want to preserve this slice in time, forever”. Then you look at it and you’re disappointed. There is some dissonance between what you recall of that moment and what you’re looking at on your screen. This is one of the reasons I love to edit my photos shortly after taking them. This way I can make sure to stay true to what I remember of that moment.

I took this shot on a crisp fall morning after the fog started to lift off the lake. I remember looking outside and thinking Wow!!! I need to get out there and get some shots. The lake was completely calm like glass, the fog was almost all gone and there were just a few fluffy clouds lingering above the lake surface. It was magical. I walked down to the shore and squatted down next to the washed out log in the right corner of the picture and took some shots. This is the first step of a good capture. The editing starts before you actually snap your picture. The angle of what and how you see it is pretty important. Yes you can always zoom in or out to highlight something or change the focal point of your image, but your angle is determined by the way you perceive what you see through your lens. I wanted to capture the peacefulness of the lake that morning, the crystal clear mirror image on the surface and also the lingering height of the velvety fog remnants that were drifting away. Notice that to really exemplify this, I avoided following the plane of the lake, and instead I angled the frame to really show distance between the soft clouds in relation to the surface of the water; but also show the vastness of the sky above, the texture of the sun-kissed clouds in the firmament and the picture in picture effect the mirror image created. There was so much complexity to how everything related to itself, it was truly a feast for all the senses.

The device I used was my regular old android - a Samsung S8 active. I have access to more professional cameras, but sometimes by the time you get them out and get out there, the shot is gone. What I love about photography is that it depicts a unique moment in time and captures it forever. Not only the physical composition of the moment, but also how it made the viewer feel and what drew the viewer to wanting to capture the moment in the first place. So yeah - this was done with my handy cell phone, which is usually at the ready. I instinctively clean off the lens with the inside of my sleeve as I head out to try to capture that treasured slice of time. The other plus of using my cell phone is that the photos are automatically stored in my google photos cloud.

The editing program I used for this picture is an online program called befunky.com. There is a free version which works great and would allow you to do everything I did to this photo. I however, have the paid version which allows me to download the photo without their watermark and gives me access to a lot more features.

Recalling that moment that drew me to capture this image, I opened befunky and got to work on editing the photo. It was super easy to grab the photo from my google photos as the program links to that pretty seamlessly. I always start with exposure first. This is the overall brightness or darkness of a photograph. For this particular picture I remember how vivid the colors appeared. It was a smorgasbord of colors and hues. A buffet of tones delightful to the eye and which invoked all five senses for me. When I looked at the picture my phone camera captured, I thought - “that is so dull, looks nothing like what I saw through my eye”. That is why I endeavored to edit it and capture it in it’s true and full glory. Exposure consists of brightness, contrast, highlights and shadows. For this image, I left the brightness at 0, which means I didn’t change a thing from the original picture. However, I increased the contrast to 30%. When I did this the soft contours of all the things in the picture popped a little more. I then tweaked the highlight level up to 55% and the shadows a tinge up to 12%. Now the picture began to come to life and it resembled more of what I remembered of the moment. However, it still wasn’t exactly the same. The shapes and their relation to each other through their shadows were much better represented, but the colors still needed some work.

The next setting I tackled was the one called fill light. I pushed it up from 12% to 77%. This enhanced the areas where the sun was caressing the side of the hill and made the trees a brighter green, just as I had seen them that morning. It also boosted the texture of the clouds and made it possible to appreciate their feathery edges. It started bringing the clarity of the shallow water to life to give us a prism-like glimpse of all the rocks under the surface.

Color was the next thing I edited. The settings under the color feature are hue, saturation and temperature. The only two I touched were the saturation which I slid up to 52% and the temperature which I nudged up to 10%. I left the hue setting right in the middle at 0, where it was parked. The higher the saturation of a photograph, the more vivid the colors. The temperature is a way to describe the light in a photograph. The lower the temperature, the warmer the light represented in yellow-orange tones and the higher the temperature the cooler the light it gives off which is manifested with blueish tones. This photograph had perfect white-balance and it did not need it’s temperature setting touched. These slight adjustments brought the amazing clouds to life, just as I remembered them; especially those feathery clouds directly above the ridge in the top right corner of the image. Now they had that sunkissed glow with accompanying lavender shadows.

The vibrance setting is one of my favorites. Vibrance adjusts the saturation so that sharp transitions are lessened as colors near full saturation. I adjusted this from 30% to a full 100% and oh my the clouds and sky reached their picture perfect peak. It was exactly as I saw it and one of the things that drew me to look out there in the first place. It captured the feeling of the traveling clouds, which contrasted nicely with the mirror-like lake.

Just a couple more tweaks and we will be done with this beautiful capture of a lovely slice of time. I slid the sharpen setting ever so slightly from 13% to 18%. Just that little bit gave me the reality of the texture of the bark and contours of the rocks under the shallow depth of the shore. It made the sharp edges of the leaves floating on the lake surface palpable and it was like adding the melody to your favorite lyrics. This picture was now much closer to what my mind’s eye remembered of that glorious morning. I instantly recalled the clean smell of the crisp air when I looked at the edited picture. The final tiny edit I made was with the clarity setting. Clarity takes the mid-tones in the image and boosts them, bringing intensity to a photo and increasing the texture. I only moved it from 30% to 24% and this was the icing on the cake. Now the ridged edges of all the foliage appeared and matched my experience. It was a perfect capture.

Although this program has some auto enhance features that will do all of the above automatically through AI. I enjoy the control of doing it manually and gradually and matching the outcomes with my memory of that particular slice of time. It marries the beautiful feeling of that moment and helps me relish the memory, park there for a bit and sit in that slice of time as many times as I desire. “Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever….it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.” Aaron Siskind.