A Hobo's Travelogue: Pablo's fish eye misadventures...

I have never owned a fish eye lens or any other devise to manipulate an image and still don't, but by some mistake of trial and error fiddling around in the Light Room lens correction area, I discovered a setting that allowed me to create a fish eye effect that turned out to provide the solution I didn't even know I was looking for to deal with a few problemsome images I had taken that had potential but somehow left me flat emotionally and aesthetically unsatisfied, so manipulate I did, with quite satisfying results that my teacher Arthur Leipzig would have given me hell for, like the time I submitted a sepia toned photo for an assignment and was admonished for handing in something that "looked like I rubbed shit on it". He was a purist from the old school and he was kind of right but sometimes extreme measures are required to pull something out of the dust bin of photos that were almost good enough. My first effort at artifice was an image I liked a lot when I took it, but never felt satisfied with later because I knew there was something there but it wasn't coming across.

All the elements of a compelling image were there, but they didn't add up. The whole was not greater than the sum of the parts. And then I started to fool around with the distortion bar in the lens correction setting and it all came together in a tight composition with a touch more saturation and contrast that just reached out and grabbed me...

Sometimes you take pictures, sometimes you need to create an image....

Today I was puzzling over another photo I sort of liked a lot when I took in Silver City, New Mexico that seemed to have the potential to be a good image, but it also fell flat as it was.

It was a good enough picture but it left me craving more. Its a feeling that's hard to explain, but when its there (or not there) you know it. There was just something lacking, so after trying a few adjustments that didn't do anything for me, I hit the distortion bar, pedal to the metal, and just couldn't stop. Here the manipulation is blatant and unapologetic, but as an image, it works. I don't want to rely on artifice, but I don't want to be a rigid purist left holding the bag on a good photo that wasn't quite good enough and ended up being relegated to the trash heap of photos that sort of seemed good enough at the time but didn't pan out in the end. I've got enough of those.

Pablo

Addendum:

3/9/16

Till now, I haven't taken a photo with the intention of distorting it to make an impression, but I'm not getting around as much these days, so I have to make the best of my limited range of activity. We just got back from Stony Brook, Long Island where we spent a few days attending the funeral of our brother in law Billy's mother. I have always admired this post office in Stony Brook, built in 1941 as part of a pleasantly successful effort to recreate a New England village on the north shore of the island, although of late many of the residents are not happy about the fact that the previously utilitarian shops (butcher, baker, hardware, grocery, etc) have been replaced by trendy boutiques and fancy eateries. So goes America, but as of now, the post office abides. I present it here, before and after, with modifications to enhance its graphic impact, Hope I am not reduced to this degree of artifice to keep my output interesting.