Early Photos

I've shared a photo from this evening before.

Back in my early days of photography, I shot silhouettes sparingly. I was never crazy about capturing backlit people, their shapes appearing in black, without detail. Finding other objects—trees, buildings—meant that you had to be in the right place at the right time.

Initially, I arrived at the St. John the Baptist Ukrainian Catholic Shrine to capture the rising full moon and to overlap that shot with the church as part of the subject. My double-exposure shot didn't turn out too badly.

But as the moon was rising in the east, the sun was setting in the west, and the orange glow that lit the sky was hard to resist. And yet, from where I was standing, with the lens that was on my Minolta X-700 SLR, there was no way that I could capture the sunset and the church in the same frame.

So, as soon as I had taken my two photos of St. John's and the moon, I walked out to Heron Road and onto the bridge that spans the Rideau Canal and river. When I was far enough away, I took my shot.

On the processed slide, the orange glow of the sun was intense, with some purple-blue clouds that were low on the horizon. The Ukrainian Catholic Shrine was in perfect silhouette.

More than 30 years later, I digitized my slide and ran it through Luminar AI, looking to augment the orange sky with more clouds, but doing so only ruined the photo. I loved the rich orange hue of the original. So, to prepare this photo to share, I only removed the bits of dust that were captured during the scan, I added an additional 10 percent contrast to the image, and increased the saturation, again by 10 percent, to compensate for the loss in the scan. Finally, I cropped the image to a 16:9 ratio so that some other buildings, whose rooftops were slightly visible at the bottom, were cut out.

This photo looks close to what the slide shows when I just hold it up to ambient light, minus the cropped-out section.

When I see some of my early photos, in some ways I see that I've come a long way with my more recent shots. But when I see photos like this. I think I perfected some techniques pretty early on.

Happy Thursday!