I was going to photograph another sundown at my favorite spot, when I spotted this deceased majestic bird and it’s equally dead mate. No idea how they died, but somehow black and white seems more fitting for this image than color. I upped the contrast and tweaked the conversion, it is not a “convert to greyscale” from PS.
I had another one where the swan was less diagonal (the long neck from the head to the body), and in comparing the two I found that the other one was lacking impact.
The day after we went to the viermolengang, I wanted to go to Kinderdijk. Jan Paul had an interesting route straight across the province, using roads that were probably around since before time began ( 
).
Turns out he thought it was somewhere else. Didn’t matter, the trip itself was an interesting one.
There were a lot of pictures that I would call “great” but alas, the deal is that I only publish the one I think is the best of any shoot. It took some tweaking, well actually, I tried various ways of getting the most out of the picture, and I settled for “Selenium toning”, one of the development presets you can find in lightroom 2.0.
I also straightened the horizon a bit (yes, the windmill is a cousin of the tower of Pisa ). The vignetting is caused when I reduce brightness, same as with the Zaanse Schans picture- I like it. Sorry about the posterization (a.k.a. banding), that is because JPEG is only 8 bits-it can’t handle the subtle shades of purple. It looks swell in 16 bit PNG though.
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