Goodrich River Delta

On a trip to Cape May back in April, I did a double-take as I passed through Elmer, NJ. Doubling back a few hundred yards later, I stopped in front of Fred Harz & Son, a full-service tire dealer.

Mr. Harz and progeny must have known a crazy photographer would be passing through that Saturday, as they had a neat stack of imposing, giant tires, treads nicely whitewashed, in front of their place. The old black tires, whitewashed stripes, and strong midday sun cried out for some photo-fun. I got several good views of parts of the stack, all with my pocket-sized Canon S90, and I'll put up some of the others over the next few blog posts.

Meanwhile, here's my favorite. The zigzagging channels reminded me of a river delta, hence the title of this post.

For those who are wondering, here's the "civilian" view of what I was shooting at.

Translucent Green Leaf

A really big leaf, photographed contre-jour.

I always wanted to say that!

Contre-jour, not big leaf.

Flag Ladder Foolery

At the carnival the other morning, I found this "flag ladder" lying next to a white trailer. I propped it up against the trailer, noticed the strong shadow, and liked the shapes and colors.

Back in the lab, the deep black shadows my eyes saw turned out to be not-so-deep greyish-blue. The photo at left is about the best I could do by just setting the trailer to white point in the Levels control (I use Photoshop Elements 4, so I don't have access to curves.)

I still wanted to see what my eyes "saw", so I used the polygonal lasso tool to select the shadow areas and make them really black. While I was at it, I lassoed the colored parts of the ladder so as to bring up the white areas.


Here's what the end result looks like. Definitely more dramatic, but did I overdo it? (BTW, the jpg here shows some jaggies along the edges of the black shadow, but in the full-sized image, the edge is very clean.)

What do you think?