A benefit (and a curse) of digital cameras is that it’s easy to take lots and lots of photos without having to worry about the cost of film and developing. This is a benefit especially when you keep every photo you took, and a curse because doing so means you constantly seem to be running out of hard disk space. In the scheme of things though, hard disk space is cheap and easily expandible, and it is nice to be able to look back on photographs you took years ago, and perhaps with the aid of improved software or just better post-processing skills, to produce new images from those old files.
One of the benefits of a blog like this is that it can act as a showcase for these new interpretations of old shots, which is why today’s post is of a shot taken in Dundrum over 3 years ago – a shot which up to now has never been seen.
Dundrum has changed dramatically in recent years with the arrival of the mammoth Dundrum Town Centre, a place where I’ve spent too much time and money. I blame the fact that it was on my commute home for 3 years, and will be again very shortly.
Back in 2006 I acquired my first digital SLR camera – the Nikon D50 – which served me very well, and was and still is capable of producing nice images. This shot is not the first to be posted here that was taken with that camera, and it won’t be the last.
Not long after getting the camera I went down to the Mill Pond which is one of the nicer features of Dundrum Town Centre to take some night time shots. The Mill Pond includes a water fountain which puts on a show synchronized to music every hour or so, and I was hoping to get some nice photographs of the fountains. I did come away with an image I really liked which I’ll post tomorrow, but while waiting for the fountains to start up I zoomed my lens in on the restaurants which face the pond and took the shot you see here.
Until I revisited the images with a view to posting the shot of the fountain you’ll see tomorrow, I actually had dismissed this image, but on a second viewing some 3 years later, I saw potential in it and so imported it into the Aperture software that I use for all my post-processing.
When I first took the shot, I didn’t have Aperture or anything nearly as good as it – even Photoshop back then didn’t have the capabilities of Aperture now – so maybe I wouldn’t have been able to get the look that I’ve settled on here.
There’s something satisfying to my eye about the way the shot is divided up by the window frames and the balcony and even the folded up umbrellas into small boxes, and there’s no doubt that the shot is full of colour and light. I have mainly played around with the contrast of the image in post processing to emphasize the light, and to bring up the saturation of the colours a little bit more.
Looking at this image now I’m surprised that it took me 3 years to like it, but I think at the time I was so satisfied with the wider angle shot of the fountain that I was just happy to come away from my trip to Dundrum with that one photo. But that’s a story for tomorrow’s post.
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