“In the morning everything is joyous and bright, the delicious purple of the dawn changes softly to daffodil yellow and white; while the sunbeams pouring through the passes between the peaks give a margin of gold to each of them…. The birds begin to stir, seeking sunny branches on the edge of the meadow for sun-baths after the cold night, and looking for their breakfasts, every one of them as fresh as a lily and as charmingly arrayed. Innumerable insects begin to dance, the deer withdraw from the open glades and ridge-tops to their leafy hiding-places in the chaparral, the flowers open and straighten their petals as the dew vanishes, every pulse beats high, every life-cell rejoices, the very rocks seem to tingle with life, and God is felt brooding over everything great and small.”
The city of Atlanta issued a stay-at-home emergency order yesterday, shuttering all but essential businesses and services, though parks (for now) remain open. It’s not more concerning than what was already happening, mostly, but is a little confusing: there have now been varying restrictions at the federal, state, and city or community level, with inconsistencies and overlapping dates that suggest lack of coordination. I could drive to another county and go to a restaurant (but won’t), or drive a few other miles and find park entrances blocked instead of open. With rain in the forecast for a few days, people will probably stay home anyway; but I wonder if the warmer, clearer days later in the week will cause a surge in park visitors. So I stay put, eager for the rains to move out so I can crawl around the garden with a macro lens and look for buds and bugs.
As I write this, I hear a sound like the ticking of a clock but can’t pinpoint the source. The ceiling fan over my desk makes a light breezy sound; I can hear the air moving. A little girl laughs outside, but I don’t see anyone; she could be a couple blocks away since sound carries so much farther in the silence. Silence defines these moments.
Yet birds were singing earlier than usual this morning as the sun should have come out but stayed hidden behind some storm clouds. Their spring melodies seem louder and chirpier than usual, but they all went mute as a rumble of thunder rolled through and it got darker and some rain started to fall. I need to turn on a second lamp to soften the screen’s white glow, but I can’t reach it without getting up and the dog just fell asleep on my foot … so I’m stuck here while my foot falls asleep too. Rain always chills him out: he set aside the toy tiger he was dismembering, barked at the thunder a couple of times, then decided to take a nap. Dogs do get it right.
I’ve written before about the astonishing tree canopy that distinguishes Atlanta from a lot of urban areas, and in previous posts featured a couple of the earliest trees to make spring leaves here: a Japanese Maple in my back yard and a Bradford Pear at the street out front. As I looked outside this morning, though, I noticed that new green is appearing all around me, the barren branches of winter filling in with fast-growing leaves. The shift from winter gray to spring green has an especially luminous glow, despite sunless skies. Even as we slow down or shut down, the new season marches on.
Here is the second gallery of daffodils I found at Oakland Cemetery’s gardens. I’m especially fond of the colors at the center of these flowers; the cups remind me a little of fresh peaches mixed in orange sherbet … which will end out on my next grocery delivery order. 🙂
Select the first image if you would like to see larger versions in a slideshow. The previous daffodilly post is Spring 2020: March is for Daffodils (1 of 4); and all my posts and photos in this series are tagged Spring 2020.
From “The Onset of Spring” by Elizabeth Lawrence in The Writer in the Garden, edited by Jane Garmey:
“[The] first daffodil to bloom is the short-stemmed pale yellow trumpet that grows in most old gardens. It comes with the crocuses and early shrubs…. As a rule, this little early trumpet is at its best in February, and is quickly followed by other early sorts…. Daffodils are in [full] bloom by the middle of March. They bloom before the leaves are on the trees, and the shrubs that bloom with them are leafless too.”
“[Modern] breeding has changed the shapes and colors of daffodils and given the gardens and meadows of the world a variety beyond anything the old poet [Wordsworth] could have imagined two hundred years ago. The old, well-remembered flowers have contributed some of their finest qualities to hundreds of variations.”
Hello! Having expelled a huge volume of words a couple of days ago (see Isolated White Irises (and Cognitive Overload), I’ll keep this post extra-short — just long enough to introduce the first of four galleries of colorful daffodils making their appearance at Oakland Cemetery’s gardens.
Select the first image if you would like to see larger versions in a slideshow. Thanks for taking a look!
“Caught up in such a radical overload of competing signals, the self naturally acts to preserve its equilibrium. We have several options. We may try to put curbs on intake, and if we can’t just shut off the flow, we learn to direct our attention selectively; or else we economize by skimming, taking in the highlights of a book, an event, a speech or conversation. Where possible we speed ourselves up or divide our awareness in such a way that we can carry on several activities at once…. But … it’s worth inquiring about the cost, which is surely a loss of focus, attention, immersion, and connectedness….
“This dilution is what inevitably happens when the attention is distributed or fragmented. After all, an experience, an encounter, is only ever as intense, as ‘real,’ as our ability to respond to it — it is always less about the event than about the perception of the event. We are all capable of complete engagement on one end of the spectrum and scattered distractedness on the other. Who of us imagines he is exempt? The greener grass on the other side of the fence has more to do with the desire for greater focus than with the actual color of that other field….“
“We normally avoid mental overload by dividing our tasks into multiple easy steps, committing intermediate results to long-term memory or to paper rather than to an easily overloaded working memory. We cover long distances by taking our time and conduct our mental lives by the law of least effort.”
“Attention casts the deciding vote in what we perceive of the world and so is the beast to harness in a world of cognitive overload.”
“Isolated White Irises and Cognitive Overload” — how’s that for a blog post title?
Once upon a time, in the years before I decided to retire, I was part of a large project team working to replace a complex set of software systems for a manufacturing business. The project lasted about five years and was sort of my swan song since it took place in the third decade of my information technology career. As the project moved from beginning to end — sucking up exponentially more time, money, people, and brainpower — it turned into the most stressful event of my entire career…. actually, of my entire life. I started trying to manage my stress by walking and walking and walking — and listening to audiobooks about how to manage stress. That’s not really important any more; I only mention it to provide context for the rest of this post.
In about the second year of the project, people began to talk about how the stress was affecting them. I’ll always remember a meeting where one of the team members told us that on the way into the office, she had tried to use a credit card instead of her i.d. badge to access the building then presented her i.d. badge to pay for coffee. We had a good laugh about that — humor is often about juxtaposition — but we were also laughing a little uncomfortably maybe, because each of us was making the same kinds of mistakes, with greater frequency than any of us considered normal.
We were all experiencing a kind of cognitive overload that occurs when trying to deal with constantly competing, conflicting demands and an endless flood of new inputs that we had to think about on a daily — sometimes hourly — basis. This kind of overload — different from information overload, which is benign by comparison — occurs when external events present more than your brain can effectively process and separate into short-term and long-term memory, so short-term memory (which also enables you to complete most tasks) hiccups like a computer that can’t keep up with the demands on it.
Think of it this way: when you visit any city for the first time, you’ll often feel a little disoriented as you take in a large number of new sensory inputs and try to navigate unfamiliar streets. You’ll feel less uncomfortable the second time, more comfortable the third time, and fairly quickly adapt (you are a marvelous adapting organism!) to your newly understood surroundings. Now imagine the same scenario, except that every day that you set out, the streets have been rearranged — and you will gain some insight into what cognitive overload really means.
As a simplistic explanation, your brain seeks its own natural efficiency and keeps you functioning by doing two things: first, it filters out excess information that’s not relevant to what you’re trying to focus on; and, second, it tries to help you “automate” your experiences so that things you’ve already learned — especially tasks you want to execute in a sequence — don’t have to be consciously relearned every time you do them. Driving is a good example: once you’ve learned and had sufficient experience with the step-by-step actions required to crank up the car and propel it toward a destination, you don’t have to consciously walk through those steps every time. You simply act on them, effortlessly and subconsciously. The process steps have essentially become automatic, freeing up your brain (and you!) to think about something else.
So what’s happening, right now?
You don’t need me to point out that you’ve been bombarded over the past few weeks with a huge volume of information. Unlike the excessive political and cultural noise that has increased over the past few years, this information is different: it’s disrupting daily life in ways we don’t even fully understand yet; and it’s about an event that potentially threatens your physical health — and is therefore harder to turn off. Below are a few observations — born of my own five-year war on stress and trying to help others deal with it.
We all rely on a variety of information sources, but it’s important to remember that our “information infrastructure” is based on a attention-capturing revenue model, specifically tuned to trap you in a psychological state where you find it difficult to turn away. The model isn’t just embedded in social networking sites; it has permeated most media outlets — regardless of their form — and tries to draw you in by hooking you emotionally with sensationalism, or, right now, with fear. Consider, for example, these two recent headlines from different sources, about the same moment in time (four days ago) and about the same news:
Coronavirus explodes in Georgia with nearly 150 cases confirmed
146 cases of coronavirus confirmed in Georgia
The phrases “coronavirus explodes” and “nearly 150 cases” in the first headline are typical of the millions of bits of clickbait that we’re all inundated with: the headline uses emotionally-charged and ambiguous terms to heighten your anxiety and get you to click. The second one presents the headline as a precise statement of fact and you’ll have a completely different reaction to that: your brain processes it less emotionally and with less anxiety as information instead of grasping first at your fears. If you’re getting information from sites that constantly play on your emotions (those using emotion and ambiguity to get your attention), stop following them or reading them and find better sources (they’re out there). In many cases, these better sources will be more local and useful for you anyway (the second headline was from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution), and very deserving of your attention and support.
Because your brain is attempting to perceive, process, and integrate so much news and information — and that news and info has such an impact on what you do and how you act — the parts of your brain that help you perform common daily tasks are overloaded by trying to sort it out. You may feel this as a sense of slight confusion or fog, or reduced awareness of your external surroundings. Like the story I told about switching an i.d. badge with a credit card, you might temporarily forget steps in tasks, make mistakes you don’t normally make, or do things out of order. So allow yourself to slow down a bit, make lists or consciously bring steps in a task into focus as you do them, or take a few deep breaths before you drive a car or operate machinery or tools — and you may notice that the fog of cognitive overload at least partially dissipates as you shift your whirling thoughts to the present moment instead.
People deal with anxiety and stress in many different ways, of course; but I think that it’s useful to recognize that one driver of increased anxiety is actual — or perceived — loss of control. Most elements of this event have been imposed on you, it’s highly impactful, you can’t avoid it, and its has no contextual precedent in your life experiences. So try to just accept that and influence what you can: your immediate physical surroundings, your relationships and interactions, the thoughts racing around in your head, and the information you consume.
Activities like reading, writing, listening to music, or creative pursuits (like photography!) help shift your brain onto something other than thoughts about things you can’t control; and activities that also include light, low-risk, repetitive physical activity can be even more effective. That’s why walking in natural surroundings works so well as a stress-reducer: your brain can idle as it effortlessly takes in natural sights punctuated by the rhythmic movement of your legs and the rhythm of your breathing. Of course — in these circumstances — you have an additional risk assessment to keep in mind, so only walk where you have confidence in its safety and the ability to keep your distance, since you can only control your own actions and not the actions of others. If you have a dog, dogs, a cat, or cats, engage in play as much as you can; my little pup has turned out to be a top-notch performer when it comes to helping me reduce my stress levels — and, apparently, he never gets tired of playing ball!
You may have experienced some anxiety about buying essential supplies, especially food, and especially after seeing news coverage of quarter-mile long lines at grocery stores and overstuffed carts. A couple of mollifying thoughts, based on what happened in the Atlanta area: (1) over a period of three days last week, families everywhere learned that schools were closing and businesses were sending tens of thousands of people home to work, effective almost immediately and with an unknown end date; (2) many families of course realized that they needed extra food and other supplies, to cover those meals that were provided in schools or by grabbing breakfast or lunch at a nearby restaurant during the workday; (3) the shift home came just before a weekend, when stores are typically busier anyway.
These factors combined with inadequate government messaging about supply chains to create an unprecedented surge in demand, which settled down in less than a week. The grocery stores near me are still busier than usual and taking extra time to restock, but surge-buying is subsiding. We can all help each other by planning a little ahead for our essential purchases: where you may have been accustomed to dashing to a store to fill gaps in the fridge or pantry, try to plan out meals for as many days as you can, and shop or order from delivery services at regular intervals but no more than necessary. Every human interaction now implies some risk: even if you choose to have supplies delivered, several people must interact to make that happen. We are not, unfortunately, accustomed to thinking about the apparent miracle of food appearing in our grocery stores or packages materializing on our front porches, but this is a good time to consider all the individuals that make that possible.
Planning ahead can help you manage some of the anxiety; even the mental act of planning helps smooth those ragged thoughts — some of which you might direct toward the millions of people already suffering from food insecurity that will increase in these times. Check organizations like Feeding America or Meals on Wheels for local chapters and donate if you can; these organizations can take even a few dollars and stretch it substantially to help families in need. United Farm Workers of America is an excellent resource for learning more about how those fruits and vegetables actually get from the field to your kitchen. They would like you to know that the people who put food on your table do not get to telecommute — and are among the many heroes who deserve our thanks.
Give yourself a break from the bad news by trying to find some of the emerging good news, things that are happening around you that are a testament to human beings and their endless creativity, ingenuity, and spirit. Locally, for example, many restaurants are converting to pickup and delivery to keep some of their staff employed; others are distributing meals to laid-off employees or providing lunches and dinners to first-responders and health-care workers; and a local animal shelter is even trying “drive-up adoptions” so people can continue to foster or adopt animals while minimizing exposure to others.
For me, being something of a tech/culture/society nerd, I also like to dig into stories about how some of the changes happening right now may point toward permanent shifts in how society is structured. Picture this: over the last week, as much as 30% of the American work force — in both private and government organizations — streamed from their office buildings and skyscrapers to work at home instead of in crowded offices, some initially stumbling perhaps over the difference between face-to-face and remote or video interactions but quickly adapting. Many will return, I’m sure; but others will begin to realize their work is just as satisfying wherever it’s performed, and some organizations will recognize that their physical presence in a concrete and steel structure really isn’t required. Imagine, for example, that in some number of cities in any country, several thousand people no longer have to commute every day, and just one block of skyscrapers gets converted into affordable housing or even green-space. Dreamy, perhaps, but I do believe the seeds of transformational place-related changes — whose potential has been visible for years now — are being planted as this event unfolds.
By Monday, March 15, nearly every public space I like to haunt (like Zoo Atlanta, Atlanta Botanical Gardens, Atlanta History Center) had closed for at least two weeks. I’m not complaining! Parks like Grant Park, Piedmont Park, Oakland Cemetery, and many others remain open, but I’ve decided to stay away for now, instead planning to finish processing a few hundred spring photos I’d already taken at Oakland, and shifting the camera’s focus to the early growth in my own garden. I took and posted a lot of photos from my garden last year — so for me it seems a little like a rerun — but we’ll see what sort of new and creative things I can do with some of the same subjects on a reboot. I probably won’t write 2500-word essays (this was exhausting!) with each batch of photos … or maybe I will! 🙂
For the gallery below, I took the first pair of photos a couple of weeks ago, thinking that the incoming irises would be light blue or purple, based on their tip colors. Turns out — as I discovered on a second trip — they bloomed in pure white, presenting a nice contrast with the background colors, or against a background converted to black as in the last three photos.
Thanks for reading and taking a look! More spring colors soon … be safe!
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going — “
“Images don’t see…. You’re wrong, images see with the eyes of those who see them….“
Monday was a best-of-times day, temperatures in the mid-60s, no rain for a change, with enough clouds to give The Photographer some soft shade over tiny new plants popping up in the ‘hood. I’d considered making a trip to Atlanta Botanical Garden, wanting for a while now a day nice enough to stroll around with a couple good lenses. But Monday was a worst-of times day also … more people got sick, red dots on maps developed into larger red clusters, stocks tanked, nearby schools announced closures, and I found myself wondering who dropped me into the “elderly” category that ought to be practicing “social distancing” — a practice that now applies to everyone. So I skipped the Botanical, lovely as it is — with its crowds and lines and enclosed greenhouses — glad, instead, for the nearby presence of parks and gardens where I could walk around on sparsely-peopled paths, screaming “STAY BACK SIX FEET!” if I encountered another human … which actually never happened.
The opening lines to Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities is of course a well-known, somewhat cliche, encapsulation of cultural anxiety and dysfunction, written at another time and written about a time before that. But it also serves as a reminder that the normalcy (if you could call it that) of a few days or weeks in the past can dissipate like wisps of candle smoke — poof! — leaving an unsettled scent behind… while we all sort of sit and ponder which “times” we are in, and when the script will flip. I wonder, when he wrote it, if he knew how many generations would remember it….
Blindness by Jose Saramago is like Dickens at Burning Man. It’s a strange, intense, violent little book about the sudden emergence of an epidemic of blindness that afflicts nearly everyone in an unnamed city. It was written in 1995, years before the more recent appearance of novels and movies featuring characters whose physical senses are hobbled — like A Quiet Place, Bird Box, and Perfect Sense — and was itself adapted into a movie by the same name. The movie does a decent job of capturing the dark mood of the book, while suffering — like a lot of movie adaptations do — from too much focus on sensational elements from the novel rather than character development. The book, on the other hand, is exhausting to read, mostly because Saramago uses a stream-of-consciousness style with (as Wikipedia says) “many long, breathless sentences in which commas take the place of periods, quotation marks, semicolons and colons” … which is a literarily subtle way of saying it goes on, and on, and on, and on. And with the book’s tendency to switch spoken dialogue from one character to another without telling you, it’s a jarring and disconcerting read — that being, I suppose, the whole point. Obviously this isn’t a book recommendation (and you probably shouldn’t be consuming apocalyptic books (or movies) right now anyway) — it’s just about my state of mind — though I was pleasantly surprised to find that short quote above about the power of images in a tiny bit of dialogue.
Speaking of images!!
Monday’s outing got me a nice collection of new photos that I think I’ll sort out by color, so here are the white ones in two galleries below. The first gallery shows tiny blooms of a spring snowflake (nice name!), just starting to make their appearance. The second gallery — according to the identification I got from Plantnet Identify — may show a strain of baby’s breath; I’m not convinced that that’s correct (because the stems look too thick for baby’s breath), so if anyone knows for sure, let me know.
Thanks for reading and taking a look! More spring colors soon … be safe!
With so many easily applied computerized shortcuts to aesthetic appeal at our disposal, many people have come to associate their use with obvious, often egregious, visual effects and gimmickry.
I take no issue with any method of creating images, so long as the artist’s purpose is fulfilled. To me, an image should encapsulate a state of mind and a deeper meaning than just aesthetic appeal, and I use whatever tools I need in order to convey the moods, sensations, or ‘stories’ that I am after….
[I] wish to reflect something of the experience of creation, discovery, and romance I felt at the time of making the image. It therefore seems obvious to me that my images should look natural, regardless of any tool used or creative license I allow myself. I create images in order to satisfy my desire for significant experiences and with the purpose of sharing such experiences with others who may be similarly inspired by them….
Various methods and tools sometimes lumped under the term ‘manipulation’ can be effective in overcoming limitations imposed by the capabilities of cameras and lenses, or by undesirable qualities of subject and light, and that may obscure what an image is about — what the artist sought to express and the impression they wished to impart….
What’s real about an expressive image is never its objectivity, but how it is subjectively perceived.
I often like to include quotes on some of my blog posts like those above from Guy Tal’s More Than a Rock. Tal’s essays move effortlessly from ideas about a photographer’s vision to writings on creating images and how to do it better, and — most importantly — how to think about it better. His is among many photography and creativity books that I often turn to for sustenance and grounding — in this case after stumbling into an internet trash heap where people were throwing rubber chickens at each other whilst debating their preferences for “un-manipulated” images. This is a recurring argument on photography web sites that never ends well … or just never ends. I didn’t participate, but I read too much and it made my brain hurt, so I needed to dive into a good book.
My quote selections are seldom entirely random: they often relate (at least around the edges) to a post I’m writing, though sometimes their equally spurred by things I haven’t written … posts still in my head, you might say; or the stream-of-consciousness of a madman, you should not say. Books, for me, always have been and always will be a refuge from the barely-hinged ramblings on the web, and More Than a Rock is no exception. Highly recommended, his book is, if the subjects he covers interest you.
With every series of photographs I take, I end out with a handful that I set aside because I’m not sure if I’ll be able to convert them into satisfying images. From my Exploring Architectural Photography: Steel and Stained Glass blog posts (see 1, 2, and 3), there were four like that, and since I learned a few new things while transforming them, I thought I would share what I learned. Here are the four almost-rejected photos:
I took the first photo (top left) while standing outside a mausoleum door, with my wide-angle/zoom lens set to 18mm, its widest zoom level. My goal was to frame the stained-glass window within the door openings, but standing a few feet from it created perspective distortion (which was not as apparent in the camera’s viewfinder) that I wasn’t aware of until I loaded the photo in Lightroom. The second photo (top right) was taken on a sunny day, in a partially shaded area, causing heavy shadows on the window while blowing out highlights on the concrete blocks — which, as you can see from the mortar lines in the photo, are not actually straight. The third photo (bottom left), taken on the same day, shows excessive lighting on the columns and walls to the right of the window, with too much shadow on the window itself. The fourth one (bottom right) was another attempt at capturing the light and color of a window while using the door as its frame. Since I didn’t stand as close as I did in the first photo, there is less distortion to the lines formed by the door, but heavy shadowing caused by exposure settings needed to capture the window without over-exposing it.
For the first photo, I wanted to see if I could square the door and its openings. Lightroom provides two tools to help correct perspective problems like this, the Lens Correction and Transform tools, shown below.
I’ve been using both of these tools on my recent photos from Oakland Cemetery as an opportunity to get some practice working with architecture images and get more familiar with the kinds of adjustments I might need to make to photos of buildings. The first of the two tools — Lens Correction — adjusts for the bowing effect often created by wide angle lenses, especially at the edges and at wider zoom levels (like the 18mm I used for this photo). In addition to correcting wide-angle distortion, Lens Correction also adjusts excess shadows (vignetting) at the edges, and both distortion and vignetting can be modified further by the two sliders just below the Profile dropdown. As you can see from the screenshot, Lightroom identified the specific lens I used, selecting it automatically when I clicked the Enable Profile Corrections checkbox. Adobe maintains a long list of lenses with supported profiles; but in the rare case that you are using a lens with no Lightroom profile, you can select “Manual” (just below “Lens Correction”) and adjust distortion and vignetting yourself.
I’ve seen recommendations in Lightroom tutorials and books that Lens Correction should be used on every image, a recommendation that I can see clearly makes sense for images with a prevalence of straight lines or angles. The impact on a photo varies a lot by lens, zoom factor, and camera position, so I normally don’t use it for closeup or nature photography unless there’s some element of the image that to my eye contains an obvious distortion. Apart from vignetting, distortion correction appears to “flatten” the edges of the images — which I think is why Adobe recommends using Lens Correction before using Transform. With some of the photos in my architecture series, minor variations in straight lines — especially as they transition from the center to the edge of a photo — were often rendered straight enough by Lens Correction alone.
With this photo, however, the distortion was pretty extreme so I did use Transform to straighten it further. The Level and Vertical buttons on the Transform panel correct horizontal and vertical distortions; both work well and Vertical works especially well to adjust for hunchback photographers like myself ( !! 🙂 !! ) who often don’t realize they’ve leaned forward or backward when taking the shot. Auto and Full are similar, though Auto creates more subtle combinations of horizontal and vertical adjustments than Full — which sometimes makes pretty extreme corrections that will require further cropping but will be technically as straight as can be. Guided Transform is fun to play with, and there is a short, precise video here where you can see it in action: Guided Upright in Lightroom. Go take some crooked pictures and give it a try!
Here are the before and after versions side-by-side. Other adjustments included my usual spot-removal/color blending magic to smooth out some of the scratches and dents on the steel door; color and luminance adjustments to brighten the window and render it as the focal point; and a bit of shadow adjustment to bring out some of the detail in the wall on the right side — which exposed some converging lines to draw your eye back to the window if your eyeballs drifted toward something else.
Select the first image to compare the two in a slideshow.
For the second photo at the top, I wanted to correct three problems: the lines between stones weren’t parallel; the stained glass window behind its rusted steel grate was barely visible in the original; and the stone was awash in shaded but bright light and lacked most of its real-life detail. As with the previous photo, I used Lens Correction and Transform to straighten the lines, then made basic exposure and color adjustments to brighten and saturate the stained glass and the steel grate. It would have been great to remove the grate, but I’d left my powertools at home and trying to spot-remove it away in Lightroom required too much patience even for me.
To get a look I wanted for the concrete wall, I added a radial filter over the window and inverted it (indicated by the green shading), as I’ve previously described in Before and After: Yellow and Green (and Lightroom Radial Filters. I then adjusted highlights (to counter the effect of bright light), blacks, shadows, and texture to create detail and grain in the stone, along with using the Dehaze slider — my go-to tool for adjusting contrast as I like how it treats color, even though that’s probably not its intended purpose.
Here are the before and after versions of the second photo. If you view them one after the other in a slideshow, you will see how Lightroom made just the right corrections to the horizontal lines to the right of the window, while keeping those to the left of the window intact (since they didn’t really need to be adjusted).
This third image suffered in two ways: the window, in the original, was fully shaded because it was set inside the concrete wall, and the sun was coming at the building in all its bright glory from the east (or left of the image). While the window was shadowed, the column and the wall were too bright, with overblown highlights and lost detail. I first made some exposure adjustments: reducing highlights as far as Lightroom would let me on the Basic panel, and lightening shadows to start recovering detail in the window. The column and wall were still too bright, however, so here I am using a graduated filter to reduce the highlights and whites even further on the right part of the wall only.
These changes improved the appearance of the column and wall — IMHO — while retaining the angled shadow lines from a tree nearby. The window was almost how I wanted it to look, but I added a radial filter over the window only to improve its presence by upping exposure, softening shadows, increasing whites, and lightening blacks. I also added a bit of sharpening to show more of the window’s detail, after first reducing highlights (which helps prevent fraying at the edges of detail emphasized by the Sharpness, Texture, or Clarity sliders).
Before and after for the third photo below. Note, especially, the color shift and detail enhancements these adjustments created, while still preserving the sense that this photo was taken under late morning sunlight on a cloudless day.
Of the four images I’ve discussed here, this last one required the least effort to transform. My changes consisted of color saturation and brightness adjustments — mostly to jazz up the stained glass — along with some spot removal to eliminate dirt, flaws, and a crack in one of the glass panels. I had originally intended to keep the door frame nearly black, as in the before version, then decided it was nice to expose the design of the door, especially on the left and right sides. Shadow adjustments alone brought out the door detail, with a bit of a color shift to emphasize the aged steel or antique bronze look so common to many of the doors on the cemetery’s property.
Select the first image to compare these last two.
Finally, here are all the photos of stained glass and steel that I recently posted — all of which underwent similar transformations — in a single gallery.
