Better in Black & White

There are times when a good idea for a photo goes wrong. I’ve had many of those moments and most of the pictures get deleted. But there are those times when I’m able to figure out a way to turn a bad picture into a better one.

The first one is a photo of my office hallway. I happened to be walking down the hall and thought, “this would make a cool picture”. I stood at one end of the hall and shot a couple of images at 55mm, then I zoomed out to 18mm. The shots always look decent on the viewfinder, but when I got home all the shots didn’t look right. Then I decided to rotate the image and convert it to black & white. I cropped, adjusted the contrast and added a vignette to darken it up a little to get the image below.

This second set of pictures was taken at a church pumpkin patch. My idea was to get the sun flare behind my son with him looking into the camera. Well, he was getting fussy and looked up instead of at the camera. I took a picture just so I could get something and move on. When editing the picture I tried a couple of things, but nothing worked. I couldn’t get the color to look right, so I took a couple of days to think of something else. Once again converting to black & white helped again. I also adjusted the contrast and got rid of some of the sun flare in the right top corner.

Here’s the picture on a magazine cover that I got done at Walgreens. I would have liked for him to be on Jet or Ebony, but TV Guide worked for now. He really is going to be an entertainer. The kid loves attention.