Noir: Dark monument

Processing a photo can change the “meaning” of a photo. What I mean by that is, depending on what you do to a photo in post-processing, you can change the way a viewer sees a photo. A color photo might be bright, but if you turn it into a high-contrast, black and white photo, you’ll might end up with a photo that feels dark and ominous. This depends on the subject matter of course, but I think even a group of puppies could be made to look evil.

This was a color photo I took at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. If you just flew in from Mars, you might not know the mood in the US is a bit darker, these days. While the original color photo was nice enough, I didn’t feel it matched the prevailing mood in the city. Certainly, it didn’t match my mood. And the color photo didn’t feel special in any way. It was just a nice photo of the Washington Monument.

Dark monument is not a nice photo.