WIRR 2017, January Week 1

Back in 2008, and continuing until mid-2011, I had a project called Weekly Image Rich Ruh, or WIRR.  (The project’s origins came from my friend Kevin McNinch, who has been steady with his KPOW project.) I would post  my favorite image of each week onto the blog.  Eventually the project petered out  because I wasn’t taking enough photos.  Since then I’ve had two daily photo projects, so reviving this one doesn’t seem like it should be that hard.   So without further ado, here’s my favorite image from last week:

Fujifilm X-T2, Fujinon XF 18-55mm f/2.8-4 R LM OIS at 55mm, f/5.6 at 1/680, ISO 200.

For my job at Esri, I spend one week every month in Redlands, California.  When I was there last week, I took a couple of midday walks around the campus.  On one of those days, the clouds and lights on a nearby mountain were just simply gorgeous.  I took a shot without any real expectation that I could get a good photo out of it. The foreground was a parking lot, with a commercial building behind it.  But I did love those clouds…

Back in my digital darkroom, I started to play around with the image.  I started with a 16×9 crop and chopped out the foreground clutter.  Hmmm… I added a graduated filter up from the bottom to darken the mountain and add additional contrast and clarity.  It all looked nice, except for the palm trees.  One of them was fine, but the other two were cropped so that only the tops showed.  Compositionally, it was fine, but the palms looked unnatural enough to be distracting.

I do about 99% of my desktop photo editing in Lightroom, but for this image I had to bring out the big guns.  I used Photoshop with its magical “content-aware fill” tool to clone out the offending Palm trees.  Voila!