I’m getting closer to finding the kinds of photographs I prefer to make.  One approach I have taken to find the style I like has been to go back through older pictures that I took and then to crop and develop them differently.  I took the above picture while traveling in Ireland, but it didn’t look like this at first.  I took the picture through a heavily tinted van window as we drove along.  I used a 20 mm prime lens on an Olympus E-PL2 camera.  The original picture included more details in the foreground including a fence, gate, grass, weeds, and rocks.  As taken, it wasn’t a very good picture, but fortunately, I had taken it as a raw file and thus I had a lot of room to recover this version using LR4.   In this version I have cropped out all the extraneous stuff in the foreground and then converted it to B&W to eliminate all the weird colors.

The above is one of my favorite pictures in my new frame of mind.  I like B&W since it helps to reduce the picture down to the essentials.  In this case it is a scene of two riders along the shore on a breezy cool day with frequent showers.

In the coming days I’ll share a few more of my reworked scenes from Ireland, but I like the above best.  My real challenge now is to go out and make new pictures that I really like.  It was relatively easy to find simple pleasing scenes in Ireland.  It is a lot harder to find uncluttered scenes close to home here in Hanover, PA.