Keeping a Throwaway

Even as I composed the photo, I knew I was going to have a problem.

With the naked eye, there wasn't much to the nearly cloudless sky. And the sun was still relatively low on the horizon, having only risen just over two hours prior to my arrival at Meech Lake.

I was standing in shade and the background was bathed in bright sunlight. I was going to have a stark contrast between the foreground and the woods in the distance, across the lake. And by doing nothing with the EV settings, the tiny island and lone pine would be in a nearly silhouetted composition.

I dialed the EV to ⁺0.07, framed my shot, and pressed the shutter release.

RAW image, unedited.

In total, I had shot 50 frames on my weekend trek to the Carbide Wilson ruins, in Gatineau Park. I've been to this site countless times and shared most of my photos—either on this blog or on Instagram. (If you click the Carbide Wilson Mill label on the right-hand margin, you can see all related posts.)

Of the 50 photos I captured, I deleted 11 of them while the data card was still in my Nikon D750 camera. I could see, from the preview window that these photos were throwaways: either my finger snapped the image while I was still composing the frame (for years, I've been meaning to set up my cameras with a back-button focus but still haven't set it up) or the exposure was wrong.

I didn't need to waste any more time with those photos.

Back home, with my photos downloaded onto my photo-editing software, I was able to quickly determine the photos that I wanted to process (see this week's Wordless Wednesday for a few of them) and which ones I wasn't going to work on. These are my throwaway photos, though I never delete them because I never know if I'll want to play with them in the future.

I had only taken the one photo from the footbridge that connects Meech Lake with a small bay that is linked with a concrete dam. Even though I knew the lighting was poor, I didn't want to leave this photo alone.

For most of this year, I've used Luminar AI for my photo editing. I haven't completely forsaken Corel Paintshop Pro (Corel is now known as Alludo—for all you do) but I've become hooked on experimenting with a lot of Luminar's filters, some which give me the desired effect that I would have achieved by manually controlling the edits.

And, as I've said before, Luminar allows me to change the sky if I don't like the one I've captured.

I decided that I wanted to make this photo appear dramatic, so I used a filter with lots of contrast and colour saturation. I added a better sky, increased the contrast and saturation, and applied a vignette effect. There's more that I did but I don't want to divulge all my secrets.

I am creating art, after all. Here's the result:

Pro tip^*: unless the photo is unusable because it's blurry (in a non-dramatic way) or the composition is flawed, don't throw your image away. With today's editing software, you never know what you can do with it.

Happy Friday!

^* I'm not a pro.