Today I'm sharing the first results from “Photo-Development Challenge: Inspire Me and Others With Your Artistic Interpretation”. Today's photo is one of some minor outlying buildings at the Yoshiminedera Temple (善峯寺) in Kyoto, Japan.

First, let's look at the uninspiring original:

This was from a productive outing four years ago that produced “Temple Hopping in the Mountains of South-Western Kyoto”, two examples for “Heading Out To Photograph The Fall Foliage? Don’t Forget The Polarizer Filter”, and an item on “Visiting My Photo Archives: Random Pretty Shots #1”.

For lack of a better idea, I'll present the various results in the order I received them, starting with my own interpretation that I apparently did when I was considering to post it four years ago:

The only change is the white-balance setting, though the impact is substantial. When writing a blog post about some place I've visited, I usually think of photos in terms of documenting the experience, and so I guess I didn't do much. (Often I'll do a lot to a photo, but perhaps because I ended up not including this one in a blog post, I didn't give it much critical thought.)

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Werner comments:

My Reaction: This feels more pleasing than mine, with a white balance that feels more realistic. (The white balance from mine was set via a color-checker sample, which makes it perhaps “correct” but not necessarily pleasing.)

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Ben comments:

My Reaction: Love the whys and the whats, and the result is impactful. The lower of the two buildings feels like it's popping out of the screen.

I like it a lot.

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Daniel comments:

My Reaction: This is almost haunting, and the B&W treatment gives it an “old” look. The artificial-horizon idea is neat, though perhaps a bit too strong for my tastes, but it's hard to judge on its own merits because our view is tainted by having seen other versions.

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Austen didn't provide a comment, but I can see in Lightroom that he cropped it a bit, and painted in some very subtle darker exposure here and there. He did a lot with the tone curve (adjusting how dark darks are, how middle middles are, etc.) and reduced saturation. He even added a bit of grain.

The result is a kind of “old” like the B&W one above, yet a completely different kind of old. It's almost like a “colorized” B&W shot. It feels much more calm and peaceful than “impactful”.

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I didn't get as many submissions for this photo as some of the others, but I picked this one to start because the various versions are so very different — each person went for a completely different vibe — so it really makes me appreciate the exercise.

My thoughts on the artificial horizon highlight something important, though difficult, to keep in mind: comparing and contrasting different versions is explicitly not what we do with most photos... as consumers of others' imagery, we generally only see the final product with eyes untainted by other versions or possibilities.

Had Daniel's version with the dark horizon been the only view I had of this photo, I perhaps wouldn't have even noticed the artificial horizon, much less thought it was a bit too dark. It's impossible to know.

I gave some thought to having the images presented randomly for each viewer, so that not everyone's view is modified in the same way. Had I done this, folks who happened to see the dark-horizon version first may well have thought the next one they saw too garish, like drinking orange juice after brushing your teeth. The order things are presented in can really matter.

In any case, I really appreciate the four submissions, both individually and as a group. I hope we'll see similar quality for the other photos in the challenge!

I'm going to be traveling for the rest of the month, so it'll likely be a while before I get to the next photo, so if you're considering to participate, you've still time.

Continued here...