Colours and contrasts with flowers

I went for a walk the other day with my camera in my neighbourhood and came across some beautiful subject matter. I’m not sure whether I really ever do subject matter like this justice when I shoot it but I feel compelled to capture it as best I can regardless.

Two things stood out for me while I was taking these photos and when I edited them afterwards. For starters, the photos I take with my iPhone 5 (edited with the VSCO Cam app – my favourite after the standard photo app which does a better job with HDR for the most part) are pretty comparable to the photos I take with my DSLR for the most part. The iPhone certainly takes great looking photos and each phone takes better images than the previous model. Here are some examples:

The second thing that stood out for me was just how much clean black and white images appeal to me in contrast to a common grainy effect you get when you apply many black and white presets to images. There are times when the grainy effect can add to the image but I tend to prefer minimal grain with stark contrasts in my black and white images if I can achieve that.

I like how most of these images came out. I used a combination of the No. 1 VSCO Film preset collection I have (I’m lusting for No. 4 – slide film) as well as more stylised presets I picked up along the way. I go through phases when I prefer the VSCO Film presets because they are much closer to actual colours and times when the stylised stuff just seems to work better. On a related note I notice that images published on 500px tend to emphasise the heavily edited and stylised images and they look beautiful. I’m just not sure whether I like that approach as a general rule although it is a matter of degrees once you started editing your images beyond some sort of quick auto-tone correction.

Here are some of my highlights from my photoset: