It’s weird how, as I look through some of the pictures I’ve posted here on Weekly Fifty over the years, they seem to come in phases. Sometimes I’ll have a couple weeks of macro shots. Then insects or animals. And now this is the second week that I’ve posted a picture of a building with the sky behind it, and I promise you it’s entirely coincidental. I was riding my bike past Boone Pickens Stadium a few weeks ago on Friday at the end of the first week of the fall semester and when I looked up at Cordell Hall something about it kind of gave me pause. It’s an old building, and probably won’t even be here much longer with all the campus improvements going on right now, but it’s the kind of structure that has a bit of character to it.
It wasn’t until I got these images loaded into Lightroom that I noticed a little addition to the building: the crows sitting on the railing between the two chimneys. It made me think about what they were doing up there at 7:15am on a Friday morning: where they waiting fur the sun to poke over the stadium? (Which you can’t see, but is right behind me as I shot this picture.) Were they looking for food? Were they shooting the breeze before heading off to work? Perhaps they were pondering a journey to Mintaka III. Like last week’s picture I don’t think I will ever really know the answer, and I’m OK with that since I kind of like to think of my own even if I know it’s probably not accurate.
Also, just for fun I ran the RAW file through the Accent AI filter in a program called Luminar that I’ve been using lately.
In some ways I think the results here are superior to what I got when I massaged the RAW file in Lightroom, but in other ways…not so much. I like the rich blue in the sky but the building itself has developed a bit of a halo around it that I don’t find all that visually pleasing. Still, it’s a good example of how far you can take a RAW file if you have the right software. And if you’re not ready to shell out all the money for Photoshop, Luminar might be worth checking out. (Disclaimer: that’s not an ad or a paid promotion. I don’t do that sort of thing here on Weekly Fifty. It’s just me sharing my thoughts.)