This 'stretch' wasn't such a bad thing

Anyone who's tried to use and display a digital image for their pc or mac desktop art knows the disappointment of not being able to select one that orients vertically unless you're willing to live with distortion or radical disorientation. If you pick a vertical/portrait image, then go to try to fill the whole monitor space with it by selecting the "stretch" option, the skew is abhorrent, and particularly so if the image contains a face or animal. You can center it, if you really want to use it, but it just doesn't have the same impact as filling the full screen.

Your pc/mac monitor usually is square or rectangular, so if you want the image to fill the full space on your monitor, using the "stretch" function, you're left to pick a horizontal, or landscape, shape. You probably can find plenty images in that orientation. In fact, that's what I've done for the past dozen years or so. Until two weeks ago.

I am quite fond of a backlighted vertical image from my Feb. 6 shoot in Garfield Park in Indianapolis, a sunny day that followed an overcast, full day of snowfall. On a lark, I grabbed the image to see how it would display "stretched" on my monitor as my desktop art. I was incredibly and pleasantly surprised. It gave the snow-covered ground a more prominent posture, and it elevated the background trees on the right to a position of a significant secondary element. Finally, when I looked at the image on my desktop, I could appreciate the tiny snow flecks sprinkled throughout the trunks and limbs of the subject trees in the foreground. And it almost seemed as if they sparkled.

I created a digital file of the "stretched" version by capturing a screen grab (after hiding all the desktop icons) and converting the ensuing image from bitmap to jpeg. The result of the conversion of the screen grab to jpeg appears above this post; the original image with the vertical orientation appears below.

Dissection of an image

The above image was the starting point of an odyssey that I'm sure a lot of photographers have experienced: Finding different ways to look at the same image. The "anatomy of a single image" below tells the story of one such odyssey -- some successes, one surprise and one "I'm not sure sure about this."

The top image isn't anything spectacular or unusual. It was taken inside the Garfield Park Conservatory in Indianapolis in a tropical plants exhibit. The foliage was dangling from a boulder from which a very modest waterfall was spilling. I got behind the waterfall and shot into the light behind it. Dodging the light was nearly unavoidable; the conservatory is a glass-surrounded facility, so no matter what angle I chose to shoot -- unless it were straight on -- I would have had to take into consideration the presence of backlight -- and decide whether I wanted to compensate for it by overexposing, or shooting for silhouette. I chose to overexpose slightly because that day, I wasn't interested in a silhouette; I wanted to capture the color in the foliage and the waterdrop cascade. I wasn't surprised afterward when I saw a lot of the reflective circles -- the result of flare. But I chose to use those to my advantage in this little project.

Again, the shot at the very top is the original image. Right below it is the same frame with a slight increase in the color saturation and contrast. Not a huge difference, but enough to bring out a little more red in the leaf and darken the dark green foliage shadow on the left. Next, I took the same frame one more time, boosted the highlights and increased the saturation (only a little less than the first time). The result is the image above. The red leaves, especially, are beginning to pop out in the frame, which was the objective in the first place. It's fascinating what just a tweak in highlights and saturation can do when you're looking to distinguish elements in an image file.

While studying those three images, it occurred to me that I could crop this frame into smaller segments and create several whole "new" pictures. First, I concentrated on isolating -- and accentuating -- the vertical nature of the leaf foliage itself. So I created a copy of the original image and cropped it to isolate just the leaf vine.

Again I went back to the saturation, highlights and contrast and tweaked with those ever so slightly to effect the vertical version at left. The one thing I didn't like was how the crop drew unwanted attention on the bright white spot in the upper right corner. I figured that if I really wanted to display this version, I could address the white splotch by applying a frame or border to the image, harnessing a bit of the white. Two things I did like about this version:

1) It gave more prominence to the hefty water cluster near the bottom of the red-leafed vine, the heart of the cluster falling right on top of the series of horizontal reflective circles.

2) It played up two solo reflective circles -- one just above the third leaf down, the other on the far left side of the frame, providing a sort of balance.

Next, I wanted to create an extremely horizontal frame. At the far left side of the rectangle, I placed the lower portion of the leaf cluster; on the far right, the green foliage with the white circular spot. So I created that crop off the original, went to the color curves and played up the reds ever so slightly and the greens a bit more and came up with the horizontal slice you see at left. I liked that it maintained the prominence of the water cluster; what I didn't like was that it possibly introduced confusion as the real subject, or focus, of the image -- was it the leafed vine, or the foliage on the right? My initial hope was to include the two for balance, and again initially, I thought that because the leafed vine would be in focus and the green foliage out of focus (beyond the depth of field), that it would be clear that the leafed vine was the focal point. But after making the crop, I wasn't so sure that got accomplished.

I saved the most enjoyable sectioning for last. It was the super-crop of just the horizontal row of reflective circles on the far left of the original image (the one dissected by the unleafed vine).

With only a few droplets in the image anywhere close to being in focus, it left me a challenge to find something to make this version appealing. So I pushed the color curves to the extreme -- and came upon this strikingly dual-shade purple abstract. It did fetch a few comments at my photo.net gallery (in the Manipulations folder). The only drawback to this crop was that the image file is so small -- relative to the original, anyway -- that I probably couldn't squeeze a print larger than 5x7 out of it, and that might be stretching it.

Every picture tells a story: Finding unexpected value

Backlighted photos you don't have the time to set up properly might end up in the discard pile a lot. But with some work and care in post-processing, sometimes you can come up with wonderful silhouettes or beautiful portraits with such images. This is a story about one such photo; the image might not be very spectacular, but it is one I'm glad I didn't toss.

I strive to shoot available light when possible, even for indoor family gatherings. I did so on Thanksgiving, and although the end result from those pictures was satisfying, I didn't arrive at the "end result" until after a lot of post-processing work with editing software. Even using an ISO of 1600 and a lens with a wide aperture (f/1.8), I still had difficulty getting enough light for optimum exposure in the living room, dining room and the grandchildren's playroom on Thanksgiving. With 150+ pictures, it entailed considerable work.

I wanted to avoid so much post-processing editing for the Christmas get-together. So on Thursday, I decided to use Gary Fong's "Puffer" light diffuser on the pop-up flash on my Canon 30D. I knew I'd miss that natural look in ambient-light photos, but the Puffer delivered decent exposures, didn't white-out people's faces from using a straight-on pop-up flash, and left me far less work afterward. Oh, it also helped that I shot about 50 fewer pictures than on Thanksgiving!

One image I did spend a lot of time on afterward was a shot of my 3-year-old grandson Jakob, who I had noticed positioned in front of bright sunshine, streaming in from a dining room window, as he examined one of his Christmas presents. I knew I wouldn't have the time to set up a candid the way I really wanted, or to shoot many frames before Jakob would move on to other things. So I simply pushed down the pop-up and fired off an available-light frame in hopes I'd have something usable.

The color picture above is the original, unedited shot. I didn't feel strongly about it, but I did notice interesting spot illumination on Jakob's cheek, nose and forehead that I thought would be worth emphasizing in a grayscale (black-and-white) conversion. So in post-processing, I made a copy of the jpeg, converted it to grayscale, cropped it to eliminate the tiny stray light on the bottom left, fiddled with the facial shadows and highlights to play up the spot facial illumination, and tweaked the contrast. I left in the two tiny lights in the right background of the image to retain some balance and a representation of the holiday. The lights were on a garland decorating a living room wall. The result of the edit is the black-and-white version you see above left.

Then I made a copy of that b/w image and recropped it as a tight horizontal in pursuit of a dramatic, moody feel (below). On the crop, only the bottom of the two background garland lights showed up, and at this tight of a crop, that tiny light became more prominent and, hence, a distraction. So I cloned (erased) it out. The tradeoff going from the vertical to horizontal crop was a considerable loss of size -- my guess is that this version will lose quality printed at anything larger than 5x7 -- but I do like the effect, and all in all, the two-grayscale copies gave me value out of an image I might otherwise have discarded.

Gary Fong, by the why, markets a variety of flash diffusers; most are for electronic flash units; the Puffer I mentioned above is for pop-ups and is among the least expensive. You can check out his full line at http://store.garyfonginc.com/ ... and no, I don't know Gary! I'm simply providing this in case anyone would like to explore it further.