Negative and Print, Score and Performance

Colin's post got me thinking about this whole score and performance metaphor, and I decided "What the heck. Let's just wade in a give it a try."

The original image, as captured by my camera:

Next, the version I made not long after making the exposure, some time back:

Foreground emphasized, sky slightly de-emphasized, overall tonality adjusted. I was aiming for a stronger feeling of depth to the photo.

And then finally, the version I just created this afternoon:

The second version is the result of starting over from scratch. It looks like this time around, I felt there should be more emphasis on the foreground fog 'glowing', I wanted the fading light in the sky to come off more magenta, and I wanted the clouds a bit more dramatic. That's a pretty minor change in direction and a conscious decision to 'turn up the volume' a bit more than I ordinarily would. All of these changes save the gradient burn on the last version will probably come off as pretty trivial when viewed in a 600 pixel jpg but would be fairly profound in a 15x22 print.