A bit of a random image this time. This is about a block from my house and a couple of weeks ago when I was on a walk I spotted the wall and the fire hydrant and I just knew I had to shoot it. It's kind of hard to explain but I could just so perfectly see this shot in my mind and I couldn't get it out. At first I went through all of the doubts about if it was even worth shooting and whether I should even bother with it. But, I just couldn't stop picturing it in my mind.
In the end I shot this if for no other reason than to get it out of my head. I got to a point where I knew I just had to get it out or it would keep bugging me. I knew that I had to shoot it and see if I could capture the scene as I'd visualized it. I took the mindset that even if the shot was a complete failure that I could at least try to learn from it.
In the end? I found the original shot a little flat but otherwise it was pretty much as I saw it in my mind. I knew I wanted to crop it wide to really simplify the shot and emphasize the repeating pattern in the wall. At first I thought I'd crop things a little tighter to cut off the bottom of the side-walk and the top of the wall but in the end I decided I liked it better with those included. The one thing I had really hoped to get was a person around the left side of the image. I was hoping to get a good amount of motion blur of the person so they were more of a shape rather than an identifiable person. In the end though it was just too bright to get that kind of a long exposure and I didn't have a neutral density filter to take down the shutter speed. I did take one shot with someone positioned where I had in mind but it just didn't work with their clothes and not being blurred so I went with this shot instead.
As mentioned, the original shot was a little bit flat so I decided to see where I could take it with some post processing. I'm worried that I may have taken this one a little too far and crossed over into the realm of effect for the sake of effect but I've sat with it a few days and am still pretty happy with it. In the end though this was really more about just taking the shot I needed to take. Now that I have it's out of my mind and I've been able to move onto other new ideas. Sometimes that's all an image needs to be.