TECH SAturday: Extraction – the art of seeing more……

One of the things I love to do most in making photographs is drive around until I see something that catches my eye and then try and figure out why it caught my attention. I’m down in North Carolina to speak at an event in Belmont, (near Charlotte). While trying to find y hotel and the event site in late afternoon light, I saw a few things that interested me. Below is the scene I saw from the road,
which I immediately pulled over and shot, then I made the image above, complete with some Topaz filtering.

I call this technique the shot, within the shot. After examining the overall scene, ask yourself the question what drew me to this opportunity? With the old Sinclair station it was the gas pump.
Below are three shots of a red bench against a grey wall with a great shadow. The three shots are step one, two and three of moving in tighter and tighter. Admittedly, the first shot is just to show what i saw from the car speeding by, the next two are an attempt to move in on the main idea of the shot, you may or may not like the last shot, I like how tight it is, but you may prefer having the entire bench shown in shot two.

The bottom line is, does it work for you? If you think you’ve captured the essence of the scene, you have succeeded, I was going to say Win, but that has gotten a bad name lately……..

O.K. One more, just for fun.

A little extra help on that one, the yellow box allows you to see what I realized caught my attention once I examined the tractor.

Go out and have some fun doing some extraction of your own!

Blessings,

the pilgrim

*Photo Note: All images D7000 and the 24-120 AFS VR f4 lens.