This week’s guest host is Mr. Philo of the Philosophy Through Photography blog. He wrote in his challenge post, “I considered selecting simplicity since the modern world is so stressful and chaotic that we are losing the fundamental clarity and simplicity that allow us to concentrate on what is really important.” He then provided half a dozen ideas on how to simplify our photographic compositions to get us started. You can read his entire challenge post and get inspiration for joining in the challenge here.

In my opening photo, I used several means to simplify my photo of a desert poppy. I emphasized the subject by isolating the blossom from the background using a zoom lens at full extension and stepping away from the flower. In editing the image, I used a square crop to remove the extraneous background, and then in Adobe Lightroom, I used the HSL sliders in Saturation mode to remove all of the colors except the reddish pink of the blossom itself.

For this challenge, I chose to create some black-and-white images from my gallery. This allium blossom was also isolated from the background by extending the zoom and standing away from the subject. I used Silver-Efex 3 to do the conversion and picked a low-key preset to start with. Once I tweaked it into black-and-white, the conversion made the noise in the image more noticeable. I exported it into Luminar Neo and used the Noiseless and the SuperSharp tools to enhance the image further.

This shot was shrouded in clouds and all of that big sky created simplicity by a large area of negative space. After exporting to Silver-Efex 3, I discovered there was a lot more definition in the clouds than it appeared in the original image. In a sense, this image failed in being simplified as the conversion I completed actually added more detail than when I started. I guess they can’t all be perfect examples, but I like how the image turned out anyway.

To make up for my previous “mistake”, I submit for your approval this image which I purposely processed into high-key black-and-white leaving the foggy sky indistinct for much more negative space.

Another example of negative space came from my visit to La Jolla, California. The beach was teeming with life, both human and animal. I was composing an image when I noticed a gull heading right toward my camera. I quickly recomposed to focus on the gull as it came toward me and the auto-focus on my Nikon D7000 captured the subject in perfect sharpness. The f/5.6 lens setting and 1/800 shutter speed provided a pleasingly fuzzy background and “stopped” the bird in mid-flight. If the photo has a flaw, it’s that the bird appears to have been “cut and pasted” into the image with Photoshop. I swear it was captured live.

At Carlito Springs, New Mexico, we were hiking a public trail. Along the way, we noticed that someone had placed roses at strategic points along the trail. I suspect that some kind of wedding or anniversary hike was in progress at some point and the roses were trail markers so that people who might be unfamiliar with hiking trails wouldn’t get lost. Isolating the subject added the needed simplicity to this photo.

In his list of tips, Mr. Philo mentions the use of patterns, shapes, or directional lines to simplify a composition. The easily malleable sandstone formations around Page Arizona have weathered the centuries as mother nature sculpted some of her best work. This large sandstone monolith created an interesting texture in the strong vertical lines created over the eons.

Lines can help identify objects. I’ve opined on the subject before, but the lines of today’s automobiles are of little assistance in determining the make and year of many vehicle models. They are all designed for efficiency and the combination of aerodynamic principles and computer-aided design leaves a distressing sameness. When I was a young man, I could have told you the exact year and model of the 1950s-era Ford in the image above. Today, not so much.

One of my first thoughts for this challenge involves a new hotel in Fargo, North Dakota. The Jasper Hotel opened in the summer of 2021. For years, it was the biggest construction project in the city. I decided that I’d like to take a photo of the building, do a black-and-white treatment, and add it as a photo for this week’s challenge. I used Lightroom Classic to isolate the subject, tweak the exposure, and convert the image to monochrome. Then I exported it into Luminar Neo to touch up the sky, overexposing the sky on a cloudy day to create a stronger contrast with the building. Finally, I used Neo’s SuperSharp tool to give the lines in the image a crisp appearance.

All of these images are available in HD via my Flickr site. Click on any image, or you can find the Flickr album here.

Thank you, Philo, for taking the time to guest-host this week. It reminded me that as a photographer, sometimes it’s best to follow the K.I.S.S. principle. Thanks to Ritva for last week’s Kitchen Inspiration challenge, and I look forward to next week when guest host Dawn Miller challenges us to put up Fences (photographically speaking) on her site here. If you’re new here and want to join in the challenge, (or even if you’re not new around here), you can find out how to join in here.

John Steiner