Before and After

Composition remains one of my worst skills. I usually shoot very instinctively, and unfortunately my instincts are not all that great.

Often I'll shoot out the car—it's no-look shooting, don't worry; I tape the lens at infinity and don't consult the viewfinder—using the 24mm. It's fast enough, and the wider field of view gives a few more options for cropping. Moreover, the exposure is completely manual, which adds a bit of randomness—it's not adjusting to changing lighting conditions. The exposure is sometimes pretty interesting.

I am usually too lazy to edit photos, but I made an exception in this case.

I'm in the car more often than not these days, and I travel through some fairly quaint areas that haven't been affected by rabid tourism. I snapped this the other day:

The weather was gray and there's obviously a lot of framing issues. To be expected—it's a no-look shot out the window, after all. It's obviously a run-down house, maybe abandoned, but the picture doesn't really capture my memory very well. This is probably because I don't usually look through the cage of the car, and my eyes are better than the sensor. This is a bit closer to what I remember:

While the coloration is a bit excessive, it adds a different feel that's more consonant with the area as I remember it. The windows of the car ruin the contrast as much as the weather, and I'm sure the automatic white balance wasn't doing much (the D40 has a poor color meter—another motivation to upgrade), so the contrast and color enhancements are helpful. The crop fixed the extra details that weren't necessary, and a careful application of the dodge tool removed the reflections on the glass from the dashboard. They're still visible if you look hard, but they're not nearly as evident.

One bonus the weather bought me was a uniformly slate sky; removing the wires and other extra stuff that remained after the crop was super easy (the clone tool is your friend).

The crop is square because there really isn't any compelling image to plug into a third of the frame. The house itself is the item of interest, at least to me, and there is no real set of lines or depth to add to the image to draw the attention. I figured a squarish frame would fit that better than the more typical 8x10 or 4x6 aspect ratios used for photographs.