“Experiment is the hobgoblin of genius.”
OK, I don’t know what that means ’cause I just made it up but it sounds like somebody’s real quote, right?
This is a story about an experiment post processing Prometheus at Rockefeller Center. We’ll start with the original shot.
The statue of Prometheus was bathed in the full brilliance of a cloudless, sunny day. The little faces behind the statue are actually people standing behind the wall behind the statue. That’s why you only see their faces.
In the original photo, the wall was clearly evident.
So I start messing around in Photoshop, experimenting with some of the Layer Adjustments, the ones from the dropdown menu that include, lighten, color burn, overlay, etc. Working on a new Adjustment Layer, I hit the ‘multiply’ option and Wow! It dropped all the dark values to nearly black but most of the midtones and highlights, including those little faces, stayed pretty much the same. I was liking all the black, negative space and how it compositionally complemented the intense highlights. So on what darker tones remained, I just went in with a paintbrush set to black and painted everything it all to black.
I love how this turned out.
It just goes to show you that, “getting it right in the camera” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Sometimes, to achieve genius, you’ve got to experiment.
Happy Shooting (and post-processing),
Bob Estremera