I don't remember seeing the smaller, white flowers, tucked in the grass behind the flowering plant by the bank of the Upper Salmon River, in Alma, New Brunswick. I must have seen them, as I was standing there, composing the shot, but I didn't remember them afterward.
What I do remember, as I looked at the slide, was that the sky, which was a dull overcast, was blown out and offered nothing but blank space. The colours were dulled, and it was an overall boring shot.
My main purpose in taking the photos, in the first place, was to show the difference in the river during high tide and low tide. It was our first day at Fundy National Park, and I wanted to capture various tide changes around Alma. I had already taken photos of the boats, as they sat docked at the wharfs that lined the mouth of the Upper Salmon, as it opened into the Bay of Fundy. I also wanted to show the river itself, and so I picked out a spot where I could more or less remember, when the tide was out.
(One of my favourite shots of all time—of my own, that is—was shot, an hour earlier, at high tide. I posted it on my blog a couple of years ago. I shared it again, with another shot of the bay in Alma, in another post. In that post, I seemed to have forgotten that I had, indeed, photographed the boats the next morning, at low tide.)
I shared my before and after photos of the Upper Salmon River yesterday. But I must have seen the purple flowers in the tall grass in front of me, and I recomposed my frame for a vertical shot. I must have moved a little closer, dropped a little lower. Composition-wise, it's a better photograph than the before shot I had just taken.
But once processed, it didn't look as good as I had imagined when I looked through my viewfinder.
Twenty-five years later, I'm taking a closer look at the slide photos I have shot, now digitized. And because I have photo-editing software that can enhance a photograph unlike I have been able to do before, I have reconsidered some of my 'meh' shots and am giving them new life.
When I had taken the high-tide shots of the Upper Salmon, it was several hours before sunset. As I said, the sky was non-descript and cast a dull light on the overall scene. I recognized that the composition of this photo was good, so I wanted to see what my software could do.
First, I ran the image through Corel PaintShop Pro 2021 to straighten the landscape. There was a slight tilt to the frame, an error that I can't seem to shake to this date, even though my D-SLRs have lines in the viewfinder to guide me. I used PSP to straighten the image because for the past month or so, my Luminar AI program seems to crash when I change the composition and apply other enhancements at the same time. Skylum, who makes this product, has told me that they are aware of this issue and are working on it.
With the composition fixed, I imported the image into Luminar AI, where I applied a sunset template that increased the contrast and warmed the colours. I then added a sunset-lit cloud formation to the blank sky, and upped the colour saturation.
It wasn't until I completed my edits that I noticed the small, white flowers, at the bottom-right of the frame. At first, I thought they were water droplets and that I had managed to catch them, in flight, as a breeze knocked them from the grass. Only after zooming in did I recognize the white speckles as petals.
As much as I like playing with the artistic effects of Luminar AI, I have to use them sparingly, and I have labelled my file names such that they remind me that these are not the true image. My mind has already forgotten events as they have unfolded: I don't want to create new, false memories.
Happy Friday!
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