A friend of mine got married on a bright and sunny day here in Tübingen. In processing  the photos I took at the wedding, I saw that the bright sunshine predictably left some things washed out, and overall the light was kind of flat in many of the photos. Although I already knew a few possible fixes, I was experimenting this morning with some new techniques I found for changing highlights and lighting in portraits, to add interest and emphasis in photos where the lighting detracts from the subject of the photo. Nice.

The photos from the wedding are mostly portraits of people, and  I don’t usually take those kinds of photos on vacation. So, when I  turned my attention late this afternoon to sort photos that I had taken last month in Coventry, England, there were no portraits in the bunch.

But, in the way that when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, I suddenly noticed that the lighting on some photos I took of fountains in the plaza in front of the Coventry Cathedral had exactly the same problems with the light that I had encountered with those wedding photos. It had also been super bright and sunny the day Chris and I were in Coventry last month, with weather conditions very similar to the day of my friend’s wedding here in Tübingen the following week. It therefore didn’t come as a complete surprise to me that the photos suffered from similar non-optimal lighting issues.

Now, when I teach my workshops, I teach people to remember they can take a “portrait” of anything, not just of a person. In photographic terms, a “portrait” is just a particular style photo that has certain desirable properties: e.g., clearly indicated subject via the framing within the photo, a subject that is in focus, other elements potentially out of focus, etc.  There’s nothing that says that those same settings can’t be used for any subject, and not just for people – you just have to think about taking a portrait of something, instead of someone.

I take that approach when taking a photo of any kind of object.  So, in order to counter the problems with the brightness and contrast that were in the Coventry fountain photos, I decided to use a couple of my newly acquired “digital darkroom” techniques that had been recommended for tweaking portraits of people, and apply them to my portraits of fountains.

Well, really, I guess the photos are really better described as portraits of water, as the fountains were  more like sprinklers, with no actual fountain structure surrounding the water.

Anyway, see what you think.