On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
JanieM
Several people over the years have asked for before and after examples of the images in my posts—the original, and Steve from Mendocino’s edited version. In response, Steve has provided an analysis of his editing process for #8, and there are links to the original for that picture as well as for #2 and #7.
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With one exception, these pictures were taken within ten miles of my house, at spots that I either pass in the normal course of a week or visit on purpose to check out the picture-taking possibilities. The only season not represented is spring, an omission I’ll explain in #5.
Because I take most of my shots when conditions are flattering, the pictures form a sort of mythological narrative, central Maine at its most beautiful. Everyday places, but with as much soul and feeling as I can capture to make a long-running visual story.
Steve challenged me to condense my feelings about his edits of these pictures into a few words, and offered some words of his own. I’ll just mash them up at the start of each write-up.

[Time, suspended. Waiting. Dreamy. Indian summer haze.]
The Presumpscot River runs through the center of Westbrook, a former mill town bordering Portland. I took this picture from a riverside path that runs from downtown to one of the city’s lovely parks. Though IDEXX Labs has replaced the paper mill as the town’s largest employer, the mill still survives, employing only about ten percent of its former work force but still dominating the landscape on one side of town. Immigrants, many from Africa and the Middle East, give the town and its eating places a diverse feel that I would love to see spreading further north.
Westbrook is about an hour’s drive from my house; this is the only photo in this set that wasn’t taken in my neighborhood, broadly speaking. But I spend a couple of days a week there now, so it has started to feel like a home away from home.
Bigger version here.

[Halloween. The world holding its breath before winter.]
This is my favorite of the half-dozen farm stands within a few miles of my house. Sadly, it closes at the end of October and I go back to buying eggs and produce at the grocery store. This shot was taken on October 13 at roughly peak fall color, although the glory of it is a little subdued on a cloudy day.
The original jpg as Lightroom exported it from the raw file can be seen here. Steve cropped it substantially to highlight the geometry of the bands of trees and pumpkins, then adjusted the light, partly by darkening the foreground. (I often look at a new edit and say, “You moved the lights!”)
Bigger version here.

[Pastoral. Stillness. The past embedded in the present. Or vice versa?]
Steve made a quick visit to Maine this fall and spent a night at Maple Hill. With the owner’s permission, I’ve gone back a couple of times to take pictures of the place, and will continue to do so in different lights and seasons.
Bigger version here.

[Sentinel.]
Unlike my house, where the power company took down the old maple trees some years ago, Maple Hill still has these beautiful specimens gracing its front yard.
Bigger version here.

[Chance meeting.]
Spring is my favorite season, May is my favorite month, June is predictably lovely around here. After a white Maine winter and a brown early spring, the green is a balm for the soul. But once the full summer green settles in, it’s even more monochromatic than gray November. That makes it a challenging season (for me, at least) for finding pictures.
One day last June I was walking along the road past one of the ponds on my route, and I spotted some reddish maple leaves in the weeds between the road and the water. “Hey!” I thought. “I’ll take a picture of those leaves, and show Steve that if I keep my eyes open, I can find a bit of color that isn’t green, even in June.”
And lo and behold, as I pointed the camera, the butterfly landed. (Based on the description at this link, I think it’s a viceroy.)
Bigger version here.

[Like a diamond in the sky. Another micro landscape. Jewels.]
Micro landscapes: I don’t plan these pictures, the universe plans them for me. But that still means I have to keep my eyes open.
Bigger version here.

[Lonely, timeless, mortal, hopeful. Introspection, quiet, solitary, maybe lonely.]
I always keep an eye on the sky as I drive around the countryside, or even when I’m just sitting at my desk. But it’s rare that I can make a big sky part of a picture that works. This image is an exception, and ironically, the sky isn’t even particularly striking as a sky per se.
The original image is here, and there were several edits along the way. But for me, this final (or I should say latest) edit took the picture from ordinarily nice into magical territory. The earlier versions seemed gray and flat, but Steve’s newest edit puts the picture squarely into “bleak beauty” territory.
Unlike a lot of my pictures, this one isn’t splashy or “pretty,” but it has a story: the bleak quiet of winter, that gorgeous birch tree, the loneliness of a bench at the beach in the winter; the still, icy lake; the brooding sky presiding over everything.
My reaction to this version is also partly a measure of my progress in learning to see pictures. Obviously I saw something in that scene, because I’m the one who took the picture, a pretty typical kind of wide-open landscape for me, with a potentially trite set of benches and a tree, a frozen lake, and the sky. After the first couple of edits and some time passing, I probably would have said, with a superficial and supercilious attitude: oh, that’s an earlier picture, I can do better than that now. But the latest edit revealed depths that I hadn’t picked up on earlier—partly the effect of Steve’s editing, partly the effect of my evolution as a see-er. Which are, for that matter, intertwined.
Bigger version here.

[Promise. Stillness. Mystery. After the storm. Postcard… The quiet of winter.]
The original is here.
Steve says:
A couple of times people have asked for a before and after of my edits of Janie’s photos. This example is an interesting one that inspires a discussion of the objectives of editing, and of art photography itself.
Janie brought me this photo that she’s linked as the before image, brightened slightly and converted from RAW to a file with RGB color space to be viewable in most programs. It was taken late in the day and there wasn’t much light, so she opened up the aperture as much as she could, held the shutter speed at something she could hand hold, and kept the ISO low in order to avoid graininess.
As you can see, most shadow detail had been swallowed up and the colors are dark and muddy, and the sky was quite bright relative to the vegetation. The first thing I did was to establish a crop that I liked. Then I tackled the curve, which is vaguely like adjusting contrast. I made the light areas of the photo fall more rapidly towards the midrange so that they weren’t as light, and also so that they showed more detail. From the other end, I did the same with the shadows.
Color was more challenging. Because of the serious underexposure there wasn’t much to work with, and most of what I had was extremely contaminated with red. I pumped a lot of cyan into the shadows in order to eliminate the red, then experimented with different color balances. My end product was necessarily going to be nothing like the original scene. What you see in the final edit is a creation of what I liked most of the various color adjustments I tried out. The last bit of work was burning (darkening) areas that drew the eye away from the band of trees across the middle. I darkened a bit across top and bottom, then darkened the circle of light on the left side of the lake. This means, in effect, that as I brightened the picture as a whole, I brightened the forest and house on the other side of the lake.
When I’m in the editing process, I just follow where it takes me. Possibilities evolve as changes are made. Frequently changes occur to me months after the original edit is “complete”. Janie never knows when to expect an updated edit from me. We have no commercial constraints.
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Janie: I want to add a few words that Steve wrote to me as we discussed this picture, so that I can respond to them specifically.
Steve: The finished edit is surreal. I simply didn’t have the option of anything remotely “realistic”—but I could do something—I could create a fantasy scene of a snowy wonderland by coaxing as much color as I could and bending that color to something pleasing, and by bending the curve such that the branches of the trees became sparkly and distinct—pleasure and solving puzzles. Brightened a bit, uncropped, the picture just isn’t the same and the edit is a fantasy—I look at the photo as given and try to feel what it could become.
Janie: I lobbied for this picture when we were winnowing down the possibilities for this post. It evokes a mood for me, a particular kind of early winter day when the air is still moist and the temperature isn’t arctic, but the snow has arrived with its promise of things to come.
The wide angle is important—it creates a sense of a mysterious whole, with details hidden in the expansiveness. And to me it *is* realistic, because even if it doesn’t duplicate the real colors and light of the original scene, it does give me the same feeling I had on the day I stood there and took the picture. So in a way, the camera distorted it (because the jpg from the raw did NOT give me that feeling). And Steve restored it.
Bigger version here.

[Jack London. Sci-fi scene. Washed clean, nothing but essentials.]
I was tempted to peg this as another “bleak beauty” image, but the more I gazed at it the less I agreed with myself about that. I think it’s ethereal in its paleness, like a fantasy landscape in a story.
I used this building as an exercise subject for over a year, trying to catch it in many lights and seasons. I learned a lot from considering various possible and impossible angles, in many types of weather, and at different times of day.
Bigger version here.

[Grief. Promise. Home. Good night.]
Long ago I wrote occasional op-eds for the Augusta paper. One of my early columns was about singing my kids to sleep, in which I mused about how their children and grandchildren, if they have any, will look back on us as “the old-fashioned people.” The barn—along with many another old building—embodies the past embedded in the present, and maybe reaching into a future that we can’t know, though the people of the future will know something about us.
This picture is (to quote Steve) “a wildly underexposed phone shot of a remarkable sky.” It’s rare that I don’t have a camera in my pocket, but even rarer that I don’t have my phone. That sky was begging to have its picture taken, and if I had gone indoors to fetch a camera, the moment would have been lost. You use the tools you have at hand.
Bigger version here.
Rusty
Beautiful, and thank you for the links to unedited originals and th explanations of the editing process and decision making. My son is taking a photography class next semester and I sent him a link to the post so he can start thinking about composition and editing.
p.a.
Really nice, thanks!
Does Steve still comment here? Don’t remember seeing his posts for a while.
WaterGirl
Is this thing on?
edit: my comment went through, so apparently so.
Such amazing photos! (and editing)
Keithly
Great to see those photos. My parents have a camp on a lake in Fayette. Manchester, Readfield, and Winthrop are all in my wheelhouse.
MCat
Thanks for the great photos. I grew up in Boston and I love Maine. You really captured the essence of New England. Made me homesick. I will look forward to your pictures in the future. You are quite an artist.
Anyway
These are amazing pictures! So jelly as the kids say – looks like something out of a calendar!
Albatrossity
Beautiful! And it was good to hear Steve’s detailed explanations of the process! This is very informative, as well as gorgeous!
I look forward to more, and hopefully some of Steve’s photos will be forthcoming, along with processing hints as well.
Madeleine
Thanks to you and to Steve for both the photos—your photos always as for long viewing—and the information about editing (interpretations).
munira
Beautiful – the photos and your comments.
stinger
Really beautiful images and text. Thanks to you both for both!
Miss Bianca
I love New England so much, and your photos are always a great reminder of why.
CCL
Love the explanations and insights. Thought your few words detailing the emotional essence of each photo are so crystal clear – providing an insight into the intentionality of your perception. Bringing each photo into an emotional “focus” as it were.
TKH
TKH
Remarkable! The Readfield picture could have been painted by Monet at Giverny. Except for the green leaves in the immediate foreground it has a “painted” vibe to it.
WaterGirl had fooled me earlier with an image by Grumpy Railroader in the “daily image” series which looked painted as well, and in fact was painted and not photographed. I had wondered how he achieved that effect. By literally painting it, duh!
JanieM
Late responding, but thanks for the comments — I’m glad you enjoyed the pictures and Steve’s write-up.
Our partnership is fun and continues to facilitate my efforts to take better pictures — including how to be patient when a virtually snow-free winter makes it much more challenging to find good subject matter. It’s only mid-January; I still have hopes.
JanieM
Just wrote a comment that seems to have disappeared — no idea why, but the basic point was: thanks for the comments! I’m glad you enjoyed the pictures and Steve’s write-up.
WaterGirl
@JanieM: I fished you and a few others out of SPAM just now. Just a little hiccup in the SPAM filter.