Borders, Revisited

I decided to again revisit borders with my images. When I just last spoke about borders and their impact on the success of a photograph, I was just beginning to experiment with them. I have quickly realized their benefits, even with images posted on the web, however, I wasn't completely satisfied with my initial tries at it.

I wanted this time to use borders and mimic their appearance of when a print is matted and framed. We all view so many photographs on the Internet now. When was the last time we walked into a gallery or spent the time, money, and effort to carefully print,matte, and frame an image? The end result is so much more inspiring and vivid compared to what I now think of as an unfinished product, that is what comes out of our camera and maybe goes through a few edits.

So here is the finished product, so to speak:

The double borders and white matte really isolate this image from its surroundings. Even when viewed on the web, don't you agree? I added a caption as well. For me, I like to have a bit of more information about any image that I see. Perhaps a name or a location. Something that helps me to associate the photograph or helps to tell the story of the image. I was undecided on whether to add my name or my blog URL as well. Both seemed too much. So I settled on just my name. Feels odd to see my name like this but at the same time I feel proud to share images.

Again I used Photoshop and the same techniques as from before by simply adjusting the canvas size. This time to get the multiple borders I did it in stages. First the inner black border by increasing the width and height of the canvas size by 20 pixels and setting the canvas extension color to black. Then I added one inch to the width and one inch to the height of the canvas and this time setting the canvas extension color to white. Finally I added one more inch to the canvas height and used black for the canvas extension color but this time I set the anchor to top center so that only the bottom end of the canvas received the one inch extension.

Setting the Anchor point

When I took the original photograph, I was enamored with the location and subject. The circular pool of water set the stage for the small and whispy-like waterfall that cascaded over brightly-toned weathered rocks that were cut into various slabs and layers. A beautiful pine angled overhead and would stand out against the clear blue skies of the afternoon. I had high hopes for the photographs that I took here. I used several 3-stop ND filters to be able to drag the shutter long enough to blur the water. I also used a 1-stop hard ND grad to tone down the bright sky. Even with this setup, the rock wall was still mostly in shadow so some fill light adjustment was necessary in ACR to bring them out.

I'm not fully satisfied with the final composition and overall tones in the photo though. I used my new Sigma DG 105mm polarizer on my Lee filter kit. The obvious dark band in the sky is seen because of the polarizer and shooting in a direction that would combine polarized and non-polarized sky. The sun was to the left of me at roughly 10 o'clock. I'm not sure if I needed the polarizer at this point. We were in bright afternoon light and I was hoping it would tone down on the reflections off the rocks and the water. Because of all this, I decided to convert the image to black and white.

There is also a lot of dead-space in the upper left part of the frame. If I had moved right, the pine tree would be covered by the rock ledge. If I had moved left there would be more tree and bracken to contend with above the falls that would have just blended the two together. So I compromised and settled on a composition.

Here is the unfinished photograph before the final editing:

25mm f/16 4sec

In the end, by being creative with the framing and converting the image to b&w, I ended up with an image that I now enjoy.