Beyond the Obvious - Discovering Unintended Art

April 8, 2011
Never discount the ability to create effective photographs during a rainy overcast day.

On my last day in Yang Shao, China we were hit with some pretty bad weather. Instead of staying in the hotel, I traveled to a view point along the Li River to shoot some limited edition, fine art black and white images. I knew from experience that images taken on a day like this could yield dreamy photos with just a basic amount of dodging and burning once converted from a color capture. 

My workflow for these images was fairly simple. I created a virtual copy in Lightroom, desaturated the image by dragging the Saturation Slider to 0 and then using the Brush Tool to selectively dodge and burn areas of the sky to make the clouds pop. Then, Jay Goodrich, my co-leader on this trip, opened the images in Photoshop CS 5 and added an Auto Curves adjustment layer that, to my surprise, made the images just jump off of the page.   When I have more time than I do on location, I ...