If I had to pick just one word to describe the best method of choosing an image for the One Four Challenge, it would be… Vision.

When I choose my image at the beginning of the month, I usually have at least two ideas of where I might take the image.  If the image needs to be prepped for the ideas then all the better, because then I have three weeks of ideas.  The funny thing is, I usually have absolutely no idea what I’ll do for week 4, but so far, week 4 has been the most voted for edit all four months running…. but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Today we are talking about week 2.  If week 1 is the prep week, then week 2 is the reason I picked the image.  Of course, there are exceptions to the rule.  Sometimes I’m impatient and I do two weeks worth of edits for week 1 because I want to get to the reason I picked that image.

December I had two ideas in mind, one was grungy (week 1) and the other was playing with more black & white.  I really liked the difference this technique took my black & white, it was something I hadn’t tried before and I learned a ton.  I wrote up a tutorial, check it out here.

January was a very interesting image.  I got *really* lucky with this one.  To be honest, my only vision for this one was accomplished in week 1.  The next three weeks was total experimentation that worked out to images I really love.  For week 2, I wanted to try to create an image something similar to the movie A Scanner Darkly.  I didn’t achieve that, but I still liked the image I came up with.  I wrote a tutorial, check it out here.

February was a frustrating month.  Apparently high on the achievements from January, I picked an image with only the first week in mind.  The next three weeks was an exercise in sticking with it and making the best of a bad image.

Sometime in January I started on a journey to use software that would be available to everyone, regardless of which platform they were using (Linux, Mac, Windows).  I decided to see if I could replace my Adobe workflow with Open Source software.  The project is still ongoing, but I am very happy with the results.  I’m not saying it was easy, in fact, it was very frustrating at times.  And February’s image had so much I wanted to fix, that it forced me to learn more about what I could accomplish with GIMP.  Even though I don’t particularly like the image, the editing that I had to do to make it work taught me a lot. And as far as I’m concerned all new knowledge is a good thing.

For week 2, I changed out the sky because the image was kinda boring in week 1.  I wrote a tutorial, check it out here.

For March, I went back to my method of having at least two ideas for the image.  I was super excited to try out this steam technique.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t as stellar as I had hoped.  Nonetheless, I learned more tools in GIMP, so it was still a win.  And the image isn’t bad, just not as exciting as I had hoped.  I wrote a tutorial, check it out here.

Go find out how everyone else is choosing to spend their Review Month here.

Kind thoughts and comments are welcome!

Until next time…
~nic

I have joined a month-long photo post-processing challenge called One Four Challenge, hosted by Robyn at Captivate Me. “This challenge is about processing １ image in 4 different ways over 4 weeks.” Every Monday Robyn posts a new version of her photo and challenges us to do the same each week.