One hundred and eightyyyy

I’m not the stereotypical darts fan – as a friend pointed out last week when I said on Facebook that I’d like to go to the World Darts in the UK sometime, I’d need to at least stop drinking Coors Light first – but I do enjoy watching in on TV. Some of the matches at the Lakeside during last week’s competition, brought to me courtesy of BBC, were as exciting as any sport can be.  And it reminded me of a photo I took a while back in my in-laws garage.

I’m aware that this shot is a tad boring, though as a detail/documentary type shot I do like it.  The dart board hanging in the garage obviously hasn’t been used in a long time, and I liked the way the dust and cobwebs gathered on the ends of the darts convey that to the viewer.

I actually struggled with the processing of this image a little bit because in hindsight I framed the photo incorrectly for what it was that caught my eye.  When I took the photo I did so with the camera in a vertical orientation, making for a portrait format image.  I wasn’t blogging at the time, so didn’t really consider that I might display this photo in a landscape format environment.  It was only when I cropped a 3:2 window around the darts themselves that I began to be happy with the photo, as immediately the darts, the cobwebs and the dust became much more visible.

Since I’ve started blogging I do find myself exploring landscape-format framing more than portrait-format, because it fits in the blog layout quite well, but also because the photographs here are viewed, generally, on landscape format screens.   I suppose this is a bit like “shooting for the album” at a wedding – at times I guess I find myself “shooting for the blog”.

You can see the original frame I captured on the right, as it was straight from the camera.  This composition was an attempt (somewhat unnecessary, really) to keep all the elements of the dart board in the frame – the numbers, the bullseye, the darts, and I chose a tight crop when framing to keep a graphical element to the image with those black and white wedges throughout the frame.

I do prefer the even tighter crop created in post processing.  Other adjustments performed were to adjust the levels considerably to get rid of the muddy look of the unprocessed image (due mainly to the lack of light in the garage when I took the photo), and saturation of the reds and yellows to bring out the darts a little more.

As I said before, not an exciting image, but one that had some relevance with last weekend’s darts coverage on TV, although it did get bumped a few days to make way for a few scenic snowy shots.