This picture was a completely unexpected surprise. But, as soon as I saw it, it immediately became one of my absolute favorite images.
It all started while watching the first episode of Art Wolfe’s latest video course on composition, Pathways to Creativity. During the episode, he talked about the concept of balancing the composition through the use of positive and negative space and lines to fill the frame.
To demonstrate his point, he converted a number of his photos so they contained only true black and true white.
I thought it would be interesting to see if any of my images incorporated this concept. I wasn’t sure how he had done the conversion, but I thought I would open one of my own pictures in Photoshop and see if I could figure it out.
Going into my photo library, I selected a photograph of an area known as Bear Cave at Petit Jean State Park. I shot the image years ago and always liked it, but I didn’t really find anything truly spectacular about it. It was simply a nice picture of an interesting rock formation.
I looked through the numerous menu options Photoshop has. I didn’t see anything that I immediately recognized as the means of achieving the conversion I was trying to perform. But, when I clicked on “Image” in the main menu bar and then selected “Adjustments,” a drop down list appeared, and one item caught my eye: “Invert.”
If you remember the early 1990s, you may remember the song “Things That Make You Go Hmmmm…” by C + C Music Factory. Well, when I saw this Photoshop item, it was definitely something that made me go “hmmmm.” I wondered what would happen if I clicked it, so. . .
I clicked it.
And, immediately, this was the result!
I never saw it coming, but I was immediately in awe. From the deep red sky to the blue rock, the colors are surreal. The rocks seem to be lit from the inside. The whole scene looks surreal and makes me think of something I might see at Disney World.
Without a doubt, this is in my top five list of all-time favorites photographs.
I did a Google search and found that the “Invert” command takes the current colors in the photograph and inverts them to their corresponding color on the opposite side of the color wheel.
Now, I don’t quite understand all that, but I certainly liked the effect it had on this image. And, I can’t wait to try it on some of my other pictures and see what happens.