The Great Blue Heron and the Pea Soup Pond (Creative Ideas and a simple lesson at the end)

Warner Park is not the perfect photo destination. On one hand you have a beautiful bird like the Great Blue Heron in the park. On the other hand, it may be standing in or flying over water that is pea soup green with clumps of I’m not sure what floating about on the water’s surface. Here is what I mean:

What’s a photographer of limited stamina and resources to do. Head for the pristine wilderness of course. Not. I can’t honestly say I feel a great deal of obligation to stay true to the subject matter here. At least not the entire subject matter in this photo. The environment around the heron distracts from it. As a result, I feel it is entirely appropriate to work around it. One obvious way to do that while using the same image is, of course, to a use black and white image. There is no pea soup green in black and white:

Other possible ways for addressing unappealing elements of a photo include cropping:

or using a photo technique that takes the edge off of the undesirable elements of the photo. Below the streaks filter from DFX 3 blurs the image while a mask protects the heron.

Of course there is always the danger /opportunity of selecting the heron and launching it into new worlds where the pea soup pond has lost its relevance. Below are three images created using Filter Forge 3.

Finally coming back full circle, the simplest of all ways to deal with the problem of the pea soup pond is for the photographer to slightly change position.