Post-processing (even though I don't like doing it)

Mark, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Bush and reeds, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Reeds and blue sky, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Walkway and forest, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Today was another bright day, despite the clouds. I took some photographs at Elfvik, by the Laajalahti bay. It turned out that most of the images were flat and lifeless, so I had to resort to post-processing to restore some of the vibrancy and the quality of the light pouring through the thin clouds.

Here are four images, all post-processed differently. For the first image I adjusted the levels in LightZone, nothing fancy, trying to keep the branches dark and lighting up the snow a little bit.

For the second one I once again experimented with black and white, doing the conversion in LightZone. I'm starting to like the software more and more, there are endless ways of finetuning the result, but you don't need to do too much manual work. And I'm slowly starting to get some appreciation for black and white photography as well.

For the third image I increased the blueness and contrast of the sky, and brightened the foreground, once again in LightZone, and increased the overall brighteness a bit also.

And the last image? Here I did quite big and visible manipulation, much more than I'm usually interested in doing. I don't really like images of this type, but for some reason I like this particular image nevertheless.

Update: For some reason I started to think about the arrogance of photographers. Those (us) who take photographs and present them for others to see have a kind of arrogance, pointing out: "I saw this, this is important!" It is a kind of boasting about seeing and capturing - preserving a moment of time for eternity.

However, I don't really feel that I have the skill to see better than someone else. Why I take photographs is for myself: by capturing images I'm able to study what the camera saw, and that way understand reality a bit better. And there is of course the hope that by studying these images someone else might also benefit, not because of some special skill of mine for taking photographs, but because each human being finds value differently in different things, and as there as so many of us, some of my images might actually be valuable to someone.