The Great Chaos

I often shy away from abstract images because I seldom have any ideas about what to do with the image once I finish shooting them. Yes, the pattern or whatever attracts me but what am I doing with this? Regardless, I will still click the shutter button because storage is cheap and I may find a time to work on it sometime later down the road. Well, in normal circumstances that opportunity never comes because I will have new images to process and these files are then left forgotten. I have been looking at some of these harder files to process on my archive during this period of time and I think I am at the point where I am ready to get some inputs for this image from the sand dunes of Death Valley. All inputs are more welcome but I would love to hear your impression on the image. Is it appealing? What do you find interesting in the image? And so on.

Clearly I take some liberty boosting the colors here and I have cloned out some patterns or formation that I find distracting to the visual flow of the images.

Nikon D500, 300mm, f/8, 1/320, ISO 160.

Version 2 - Midtone contrast and brightness lifted a bit:

Version 3 - Addressing the dark LL corner that @Igor_Doncov mentioned below.

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I love the colour palette and the general sweep of the image but I find the tonal values overall are too uniform to hold my interest. That being said, the strongest part of this image for me is the “curving arrow”, which begins at the upper left and curves around almost to an arrow head, right centre. To me, there is powerful energy in there and I would like to make more of that through contrast both in tone and colour. But I think more tonal contrast in general would make this a more compelling frame. I think it would be worth the effort to work with this a bit more. I feel like there is a strong image in there that needs a little more help to get itself seen, if you follow my meaning.

Thanks @Kerry_Gordon! That’s a very good suggestion. I agree with you about the tonal contrast. I played with the midtone contrast a little bit and I think it’s getting somewhere. I have posted a v2 in the original as a comparison.

I knew this was your image at first sight. It has that light toned treatment you’ve been recently doing. I find abstracts to be the most meaningful of images because they let you play with your imagination. This one looks celestial to me. I think the changes made are an improvement. One suggestion would be to deal with the darkness in the lower left corner and even lower center. I don’t feel it goes with the rest of it. But overall the color palette works well together. There is also a bit of a dichotomy in that one half is all stripes and the other is a patchwork of shapes. Somehow I want more of the upper part. But that may be due to the lower darkness. Can’t tell until that’s dealt with. I almost want to crop some of the bottom but the square frame seems so right for this subject.

If I may, I’d rather address your quandary about what to do with the abstract images you refuse to avoid taking. By all means, store them in a folder in your Lightroom catalog or whichever software you use because you may find a use for them later and you’ll be glad you were organized and kept them. It may take years to discover you really like them or even prefer them. Just don’t stop making them!

Such is the path I am currently on and it has taken me almost 25 years but I’m so glad I’m here!

You may be familiar with William Neill’s writings from his column in Outdoor Photographer magazine about organizing your images into themes (here and here). He advocates that doing so has the effect of positively influencing what you shoot. It helps to affect one’s vision. I can attest to its strengths.

Perhaps you are already familiar, which is why you continue to make these images that I consider your most personal images. Or maybe you just like them as much as we here on NPN do.

Regarding the image, it’s beautiful and I wish I had taken it. Nice work.

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@Igor_Doncov, you are right. Now I can’t unsee the darker LL corner. I have fixed it on the third revision amended on the original post above.

I have the same thing going in my mind hence the title (the beginning of the universe comes to mind). So coalescent and clashing of two or more elements are kinda expected? At least that’s my rationale.

Exactly this, Matt. I use LR but boy I suck at digital asset management. I primarily work based on my memory and recollection of images that I have made. I am starting to have doubt I can keep this going. I think I should invest some time keywording my catalog properly.

And no, I have not read William Neil’s articles on this. Thanks for pointing these to me. I am a big fan of Neil’s work.

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For someone who doesn’t like to take/process abstract images, you did pretty well for yourself to see the potential in this scene. The upper right quadrant of the image is downright celestial, and sort of reminds me of some the clouds Van Gogh used in some of his paintings. I like the processing of the third image the best, I especially like the color shift to the brighter peach tones at the top. The LLC stills bothers me slightly even after increasing the luminosity there. I might consider a crop that maintains the 4:5 aspect ratio, but crops away some from the bottom and the left.

In terms of DAM, memory alone only goes so far once you get to a certain level. I hate keywording with a passion. I would create hierarchys, and then find myself wanting to constantly change them. And all I did was paint myself into corners. And keywording is such a chore and time consuming. But I don’t sell my work, so I only need to be organized enough to have some degree of efficiency for my own workflow needs. I found that using a very limited number of broadly defined keywords organized into major groupings made things more palatable. When I tried to make keywords more granular, I often regretted how much time it would actually take to do it. I also found it helpful to toss “candidates for further review/processing” into collections, since this was a more visual way to identify stuff that I want to come back to in the future. YMMV

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Thanks, @Ed_McGuirk. The original thought about leaving the darker LL corner as-is was to create some sort of a vignette and move the visual flow along to the UR corner. I think there is a way that I can crop the LL a bit. I will play with this a little bit more.

PS. Is there an analogue here with you and B&W. I remember reading how you feel about B&W… So many directions to go with it, or something like that?

I have now looked at this one several times. Version 2 works best for me, but something about the URC throws me off. I did a really, really quick and dirty selection and content-aware fill and it feels like the right direction to my eye. As always, YMMV.

This image has a circular flow to it for me. I prefer the darker image but I think the simplification that @Harley_Goldmanhas made adds value.

Adhika, this has a very nice “satellite view of scattered clouds” feeling. I like the subtlity of the colors and the strong sweeping motion. The extra contrast in V2 works makes it my favorite. This is the kind of image that some will like and others dismiss because it “doesn’t pop”. The important question is do you like it.

Yes, processing B&W allows one a lot more latitude in terms of contrast and tonalities than processing in color does. You can push contrast much more aggressively for example. And I would agree that abstracts allow much more room for interpretation as well, limited only by your imagination.

For example, I’m biased in my own work towards cooler WB interpretations. Here is how I might have shifted color in this abstract if it were mine. Mines not better, and it’s not worse, just more personal in taste. With a daylight, blue sky day grand landscape, there is much less latitude for using color for creative effect.

With that said, I actually prefer the WB / color that you used instead of my cooler version. The pastel peach tones in your post are superb, and I’m not sure my cooler version actually adds anything. I just did it to be illustrative.

Adhika, more on thematic portfolios from Neill.

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Afhika, this abstract is enchanting, with its curves and gentle color textures. Probably just a personal preference, but I find that bright white borders are quite striking; for this image, I preferred a dusky blue-gray for its ability to keep the eyes in the image … but I am too easily distracted, I think.