An experiment today. I was playing with Lightroom, making fairly extreme movements of the sliders, trying to separate the green of the statue from the green of the leaves, to get a decent B&W conversion going, when something weird happened. I continued playing for a while, and here is what I got. The trigger was turning on Grayscale Conversion and then swinging the Fill Light and Contrast to 100%, I think. Leaving them there and adjusting other sliders landed me with this neat results. I ended up turning down all colour channels, but leaving green high, and using yellow as a kind of fill light.
It is actually funny, I think I have done maybe a maximum of 20 B&W conversions, total, in the digital age, yet as soon as I start playing with pictures for this blog, I end up trying them and liking them. I guess this is the difference between taking pictures and making pictures, so this is definitely a good trend. I can feel a deepening involvement on the software side already.
I have been meaning to do this for a long time. Most of my ruminations are on photography at the moment in any case, but I haven't taken the time to set it up all the same. I have been working towards a photography career, even if only at the part-time level, for nearing a year and a half now, and with the five-year period marking judgement day, I do need to keep moving. If at the end of the five-year period I don't have a positive income or at least something looking very promising, then I have to shut it down and return the tax money I have saved along the way, which I would rather not do. So I need to keep making steps, and these steps do need to be more serious than what I have been doing so far, which amounts to equipment-hoarding and getting a domain set up. I have sold a couple of prints to a friend, which I take as proof that my pictures are good enough to sell, but he saw them in person, something I cannot do as effectively on the web.
The next step is clearly to get a front-page set up which is more than a link to a single gallery. I need to establish a presence as soon as I can, however modest, so that I can start driving traffic towards it and getting better known. The end goal is superficially a small business which I can run beside my regular career, but I suppose there is always the somewhat hypothetical possibility that it could grow to be more than that, and become a career in itself. That doesn't seem likely at the moment, but the thought sticks nonetheless.
