Saturday, September 4, 2021

One sternwheeler, four variations

 

The Tribute to the River festival at Point Pleasant WV was canceled this year because of high water. I was up that way Sunday evening and saw this sternwheeler and a couple of others had already arrived. The sun was setting, so I got off a few shots of the sun behind the M/V Kanawha.

I picked one to see how it would look under different edits.

First, the baseline version with the color of the sky enhanced to compensate for how the sun treated the exposure meter.


Next, partially desaturated color to mute some of the extremes.


And then the full black and white.


Finally, I took the first version and went full HDR (high dynamic range) to see how it would look.


Who won? You decide.

I had thought about writing a long post detailing how I did these variations and why. If you all want to read something like that, let me know. Otherwise I'll save such thoughts for another time and another photo.