Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Lead Foot #10: Sunlight on a Red Barn

Sometimes it's hard to let go.

This is a great barn. Bright red, hex signs, stable doors along the bottom. Just a lovely little bit of rural architecture. We were going so fast that I nearly missed catching its picture. And between the speeding car and my motion as I spun to snap a photo, there's a great deal of blurring in the original.

I should have deleted it.

But I couldn't. It's just such a pretty, quaint little barn! I mean, look at it! How could I delete it? Could you have hit that button?

Don't answer that.

So I worked on it. I sharpened. I duplicated and multiplied. I textured and textured. I contrasted and adjusted. I started over and did it all again.

It's just not a good starting photograph. I should have let it go, but I couldn't. I wanted so badly for it to work out that I just kept going, kept processing. I felt like that proverbial movie doctor who keeps using the crash cart paddles long after the patient has expired.

At what point do we just let it go?

1 comment:

  1. Oh gosh! I can so relate to this post,lol. I will work and work on a not-so-great image and then suddenly I just throw my hands up in the air and hit delete. I have retreived things out of the recycle bin though,lol. Sigh...my last week of the year is always used for copying images from that year to disc and deleting old images, left unused. But, I never seem to do the deleting part! Maybe there is a therapy group for us!LOL!!

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