Monochrome

I prefer to talk about colour rather than show pictures which can be distracting and here is an example which shows why I prefer it that way.

Here is a picture from our travels in New Zealand. The Maori say that these places are alive. A waterfall like this is a person in its own right and often protected as such. I've always thought that this picture had promise. I was sure I could show why such places are believed to be real beings, so I tried again to make it work. Part of my process is to kill the saturation to check that the lightness and contrast are still balanced without the distraction of the colours in the image. I'm profoundly distracted by colour. In this picture the resulting monochrome showed me the error of my ways. I'd been trying to bring out the epic greens in this image, but it's all green. The picture is so obviously green that the green can be pulled out. The green is the field for the real subject. What's left is the real subject of this picture: the explosive, feral, muscular, living water that makes New Zealand what it is.