Imagine There's An Image

It must be hard for non-photographers, or non-artists, to walk with me. I'm constantly stopping to look at some bit of the mundane, something ordinary that everyone, including me 90% of the time, would just pass right by.

When I think about it, it must be a funny sight. I'll suddenly stop and stare at something, cocking my head this way and that, like a bird checking out a worm.

On this particular stroll through Annapolis, I stopped to photograph this waterfront warehouse, built around 1800. The whitewashed stone walls and the red doors always catch my eye. This time, though, it was something much more micro than macro - the shadow of the fence at the base of the building on the right.

I thought that isolating that part of the scene, including only a part of the red door, the brilliant white wall, and the shadow, would make a nice abstract.

And I think it worked. The image above makes nice use of shape - the triangles, texture, and "color/non-color." And all I had to do to get it was to mentally zoom in on a piece of the overall action to isolate something entirely different.

So there it was, hiding in plain sight. All I had to do was a little cropping and some levels adjustment and final sharpening in Photoshop. Well, actually, there was one more thing - for some reason, I liked the flow of the image much better after I mirrored it in Photoshop. It might be one of those cultural things - because I'm an English-reading human, I'm used to seeing things flow from left to right?