On a recent morning walk on an overcast day, the colours of this metal container standing beside some stacked concrete blocks caught my attention.

When I had time to review the photo, I almost deleted it, thinking that it wasn’t all that interesting. Something made me decide to hang on to it for a while.

This morning (actually the middle of the night), while sleep evades me, I decided to bring the photo into an editing app and work on it a bit with curves. With very minor adjustments, the textures in the various elements began to stand out. The soft grey sky, the hard concrete blocks, the rusted metal container, the pile of stones, the tufts of grass, and the fine dirt all became more visible. I realized that what caught my eye as I was walking past, likely wasn’t so much the colours as it was these many textures.

I’m just learning to how work with curves in photo editing. This particular exercise made me see how powerful the curves tool can be.

“I search for the realness, the real feeling of a subject, all the texture around it… I always want to see the third dimension of something… I want to come alive with the object”

~Andrew Wyeth