Photography~ From Pure Black and White to Fanciful to Simple and Textured its all good!

Black Friday....and I am working on file management! And if I keep finding files I have processed and decide to make a blog out of them I will never get it done! But I wanted to share a few shots from my November beach workshop and some thoughts on imagery. The opening image was shot late in the afternoon when the shadows are long and the sand glistens. There are so many options for  processing images it is almost mind boggling. I thought this simple scene would make an image that was perfect for a monochrome conversion. The scene lacked color, and a strong focal subject of interest but it had lots of great lines and contrast in textures and light. I left the shadows in at the top of the image because I liked them, I was torn on that decision, crop or not crop and could have easily cropped them off...but I chose to  leave them there....any thoughts??? The image was converted to black and white in Nik Silver Efex Pro 2 and Adobe CC.
The image below I used perspective crop and  straightened out the fence line where it meets the frame edge as well as cropping off the shadows at the top of the image. While I like the clarity of the image the first one I like better...although I can't exactly say why except I think the cropped version feels very  static to me.

In the spirit of play I always think about using the "swipeing" technique when I have a subject that lends itself. In the image above, the backlit beach fences were perfect as the light really defined their form. I pushed the colors in Adobe Camera Raw and added a little more motion using a  wave filter in Photoshop, then it made me smile!

......And when the light is sweet but the sky is bald think perfect for textures! Here I added two texture layers from FlyPaper Textures in Photoshop and added the sun with the desktop App LensFlare for Mac to make a more interesting image. Your comments and thoughts are always welcome and appreciated.
Oh and if you like Flypaper Textures when visiting their site, you can use the code KarenM at check out for a little discount on your texture purchases. OK back to file management!!