As a quick addendum to yesterday’s Monday Mystery, I decided to post some variations I did of a photo taken in a corner of that modern-day park where the old cemetery  in Tübingen once stood.

There is a stone wall of varying heights that runs along part of one edge of the park; you can see it best when standing inside the park. Part of that stone wall connects to the  gap in the hedge that is where the old cemetery entrance stood that was in yesterday’s post. So, that piece could be part of the stone wall that ran around the cemetery.

However, when I went over to take a photo of it for the blog post over the weekend, I realized that overall that stone wall nowadays isn’t that necessarily all from the same time period, what with pieces built up in different ways and levels. The part that could be “original”  that is directly next to the old entrance area is now overgrown and not that visible. Plus, that opening in the hedge is blocked by metal barriers on the park side, so you can’t even get a good shot back through the hedge toward the river.

Anyway, the whole thing wasn’t that photogenic, IMHO, so I left out those photos from my post about the old cemetery.

However, our photography group’s last theme was “false color.” The idea was to take some photos and in the digital darkroom add/change/enhance the colors in the photos. As part of my playing around with some photos for that theme, I used one of those not-so-interesting cemetery wall photos, playing to add different colored tones to see if that would jazz the photo up, as my father used to say.

In my first try,  I played with adding subdued colors and wound up “discovering” sepia tone, even though I was adjusting things manually and avoiding the built-in “sepia tone” preset button in the application I was using. Well, sepia tone has to come from somewhere, after all.  It just struck me as funny to spend a lot of time tweaking this and that, just to wind up with something not that different from a standard preset in the end.

But one advantage of this version of the photo is that you can  spot the metal barrier gates propped against the bushes on the far right if you look at the larger version of the photo (click on it to get to the larger version). Behind those barriers is the backside of the opening in the fence that was in yesterday’s photos.

Scene at the old Cemetery: Photo #1

The other two versions are attempts to be a little more creative with color.  In photo #2, I have added a tone to the bottom half to get a “dead plants” kind of feeling, to somehow evoke the sense of a place for the dead.

Scene at the old Cemetery: Photo #2

I think the photo is still overall a bit too bright to really evoke that kind of feeling, but it’s getting there.

In photo #3, I was originally trying to experiment with adding the colors of the German flag (black, red, and gold) as my “gimmick” for the colors I was adding to the photo. However, the red wasn’t coming out red enough, nor the gold, gold enough, so in the end I just played to add colors to the different quadrants (sky, middle, and ground).

Scene at the old Cemetery: Photo #3

I like this one the best, though, as it’s an unusual application of “false colors” to this image, that add something unexpected while still maintain a feeling of realism in the photo.

My favorite thing about the original photo was the sunlight star coming through the trees. It’s what attracted me to play with the image in the first place. Otherwise,  I found the photo a bit dull. But while that corner is perhaps not the most attractive subject for a photo in general, it did turn out to be an unexpectedly nice corner of the park to play in — at least in a photographic way.