Close is a win in more than horseshoes.

Late last night, well after midnight, my wife, unable to sleep, went to the kitchen. She looked out the large kitchen window and thought the backyard made a picture. Despite the hour the yard, with all the snow, looked quite bright. Still, she wondered, is a picture even possible. Soon I wasn't able to sleep either. My wife had me up trying to get a picture in order to get back to bed where I belonged.

The resulting image was marred with blotches of yellow and there was a lot of noise across the entire image. The noise resembled the clumped grains of silver that once marred images taken with film pushed to a too high ASA/ISO number.

I took the image into Photoshop, changed the mode from RGB to Grayscale and then blurred the noise that marred the snow. The change to Grayscale caused the yellow staining to disappear. I changed the image back to RGB and weighted the picture to cyan with a touch of blue and a hint of green. In my world, snow demands an overall cool colour.

My wife tells me that this is the way our backyard looked last night. She, of course, is wrong. Memory is generous. Photographers don't have to deliver pictures that accurately depict what folks see but simply trigger the right memories. Close is a win in more than horseshoes.