Photography Story: Mother, Son and Wake
This article was translated by ChatGPT automatically, with minor manual corrections.
Background Story
This is a photo taken at the Quanzhou beach during a trip to Quanzhou.
When I was taking the picture, I was actually in a fairly relaxed state, so I was just snapping shots of the sea randomly without much thought of getting a good picture. However, it was when I was capturing the wake of a yacht that had just passed by that a mother and child appeared in the frame.
Like most kids on the beach, the child was exploring this new and fascinating sandy world with their feet, the mother, as most mothers do, was silently guarding them from behind.
What moved me about this scene was how the wake in the background and the mother and child in the foreground resonated with each other. In that moment when the mother is protecting her child, she is also destined to protect them through life's journey.
Post-Processing Thoughts
As this photo was almost a candid shot, the overall composition was a bit messy. I chose to talk about this photo not because it was particularly well taken, but because, for me, the scene was quite interesting.
To resolve the issue with composition, I first did a significant crop. Because there were too many people in the background, it was necessary to cut away as much as possible of the parts that were not the main subject, leaving the trail and the mother and child, while approximately maintaining a sky, sea, and sand ratio of 1:2:2.
Simply cropping, however, still left too many people in the background. This is a fundamental issue without a great solution, so I opted to reduce the contrast for everyone in the image except for the mother and child. Unfortunately, the clothing of the mother and child themselves was not particularly vibrant, so the final effect was helpful, but not impressive. Additionally, the area where the sea meets the sand also underwent this contrast adjustment as a side effect, which, fortunately, was consistent with the logic of the image and not overly abrupt.
The rest of the work involved simply color correcting the image overall. I kept the original color of the sand, while I adjusted the sea and sky moderately to differentiate them from the sand. Furthermore, I also slightly lowered the contrast of the boats on the sea to prevent the red color on them from being too commanding.