When I spend a day hiking or skiing in the outdoors, shooting a daily photo is never a problem. When I’m working in Old Town, I can usually find something within a few blocks of the office, as long as I have time to take a quick walk. But on those days when I’m stuck at home, making an image becomes more difficult. I simply have a hard time finding subjects, especially after frost has killed off the flowers. I was pretty excited to find these berries growing on a Virginia Creeper on our back fence. The bold colors and textures was just what I was looking for. It became my favorite image of the week.
Virginia Creeper Berries
Fujifilm X-T2, Fujinon XF 60mm f/2.4 R Macro, f/11 at 1/35, ISO 3200.
Digital Darkroom I started with typical adjustments to contrast (+22), highlights (-18), blacks (-9) and clarity (+12). I wanted the center of attention to be the berries, but I kept getting distracted by the bright red stems. A hole in the fence was out of focus, but provided a splash of unwanted green from the grass on the other side. To solve both of these problems I took to the color channel settings to lower saturation on red (-60), orange (-43), yellow (-71) and green (-100). After that it took only a very minor boost to the blue saturation (+8) to complete the image. For comparison, here’s the original shot:
WIRR stands for Weekly Image Rich Ruh. This regular feature on Das Has von Ruh will show and describe my favorite photo created during this weekly period. My weeks start on Mondays, as does the WIRR. I’m hoping to include commentary on the story, the setting, the specs, or the sentiments, depending on the circumstances.
Das Haus von Ruh 