This week, Ritva hosts a “Looking Back” challenge where she revisits a previous theme and reframes it so photographers can reimagine the concept with newer images—or, for those who joined the Lens-Artists community more recently, to explore the challenge for the first time. Ritva’s challenge takes a fresh look at Tina’s Lens-Artists Challenge #154: One Photo – Two Ways. Ritva writes, “This week, I invite you to explore the different methods you use to create images. Capture the same subject through a variety of unique approaches.” You can read her entire challenge post here.

For my submission to Ritva’s challenge, I chose five subjects and interpreted each in two ways. My opening photo comes from our recent Viking Rhine River Getaway cruise. As we passed the town of Oberwesel, I captured several images featuring the town’s striking church, the hillside castle, and the clustered buildings along the riverbank. The opening image is my favorite view of the town, processed in Lightroom Classic using masking to bring out the church and castle against the softer background. I also used a sky mask to de‑emphasize the cloudy sky so the eye naturally settles on the architectural details rather than the weather.

Framing the Castle

As it turned out, my castle images didn’t give me the best view, so I simply created a virtual copy of the opening photo and cropped it to include only the castle. Even with the tighter framing, the Z7 II’s large sensor left me plenty of resolution to generate my usual 2048‑pixel long‑edge image with no loss of detail. This cropped version serves as my “second way” interpretation for Oberwesel. I’ll share a dedicated Tuesday Trek post featuring Rhine castles once I finish editing that series.

In 2015, Lynn and I spent a weekend exploring North Carolina’s Outer Banks with our son and daughter-in-law. We were up early to walk the beach on Bodie Island to capture the sunrise. As the sky shifted from blue hour to golden hour, low clouds and mist softened the rising sun, maintaining pastel, muted tones across the shore. I spotted a fisherman on the beach, one of the very few people we encountered. I envisioned the image as a minimalist interpretation and kept the sky colors as subdued as I remembered them.

Minimalist in Black and White

I often convert photos to monochrome, especially for a photo challenge, and an earlier challenge called for a minimalist vibe. Raising the exposure to create a high‑key look and removing the color made the sky nearly disappear. While wave action smoothed the shoreline, the upper beach still held compressed track patterns left by heavy equipment. Those ridges form natural leading lines that guide the viewer’s eye straight to that lone fisherman—even more effectively than in the color version. My original post about Bodie Island is available here.

During a cruise stop in Brittany, an excursion bus brought us inland to the historic town of Morlaix for a walking tour through its oldest sections. During our walk, we visited Église Saint‑Mélaine de Morlaix, a Gothic church completed in 1489. For the Tuesday Trek photo, I captured this street view, which also features a bridge and the railroad viaduct, completed in 1865. The viaduct carries train traffic across the Morlaix River on the line from Paris to Brest. The edit used AI to remove a car parked below the church window and a street sign on the right. I previously wrote about our visit to Morlaix here.

Time‑Shifting the Image

Because port stops rarely happen at night, my portfolio seldom includes evening views of cruise destinations. I happened upon YouTuber and photographer Jamie R. Mathlin, who has several excellent examples of creating realistic night interpretations. One reason I felt the RAW image of the Morlaix street would be a good candidate for conversion is the two street lights on the right wall—they’re a key component in time‑shifting a scene. Applying his techniques to a virtual copy, I removed a few additional distractions from the original scene. Then I swapped the sky for a blue‑hour sky from my collection. After darkening the exposure, I used Mathlin’s radial‑fill approach to brighten the lights, the background, and the walkway beneath each fixture. I also imagined a light just out of sight under the bridge in the background, and another street light off the left edge of the frame spilling a bit of illumination onto the back of the church. Details on this day-to-night conversion are here.

While photographing Anastasia Island in Saint Augustine, Florida, in 2023, I spotted a woman carefully examining shells along the tide line. Although this shot didn’t make my original article, you can view my gallery from Anastasia State Park here.

Adamski Effect Interpretation

Though I didn’t use the photo for a Tuesday Trek, I thought it might be a great candidate for Adamski’s digital technique: a sharp subject layered over a simulated ICM (Intentional Camera Movement) background. The process involves separating the subject from the background, then using a blur tool to create the look of intentional motion—as if the camera were panned during exposure. After separating the subject and blurring the background layer in Photoshop, I placed the subject layer with its transparent background over the ICM layer to complete the composite. I shared additional examples of this technique in a previous post here.

During a pre-cruise stop in Rotterdam, we visited Kinderdijk—a historic site preserving 18th-century windmills built around 1734. Because most of my canal shots were wide-angle, I cropped one frame to isolate three prominent windmills. The original showed a wider view of the canal and a modern boat dock in front of the plants along the canal wall, which distracted from the ancient windmills. This edit tightens the composition to focus on the trio closest to me. I then used Photoshop’s Generative Fill tool to remove the dock and replace it with tall grass. The original wide view appears in my post about the UNESCO site here.

Van Gogh‑Style Interpretation

Around that time, Google’s Nano Banana AI Illustrator was getting a lot of press. It occurred to me that I could take the photo of the three windmills a step into artistic interpretation. I decided to test Nano Banana. My goal was simply to let AI stylize the photo as if it were a Van Gogh painting. My first prompt referenced the photo of the three windmills I uploaded and asked it to edit and modify it in the style of Vincent Van Gogh’s work. Astonished by the result, I used this stylized version as the lead image for my post on Rotterdam here.

I enjoy the editing process—even when grappling with software to match the vision I have for the photo. Sometimes I have to adapt that vision, but other times I wrestle the editor into submission and my original idea triumphs. All of these images are included in my Flickr gallery with metadata and in 2K HD here.

Thanks to Ritva for letting me include more recent photos than I used in Tina’s original challenge. Last week, Steve Hyde invited us to share our all-time favorite photos, and I thoroughly enjoyed exploring the community’s wonderful entries. Next week, Sofia is our host. Be sure to follow her here so you don’t miss her challenge post, which will go live on Saturday, August 29 at noon Eastern Time.

If you’re sharing a Lens‑Artists Challenge response for the first time, welcome—we’d love to visit your post. To participate, publish your take on this week’s theme, link back to this page, and add the Lens‑Artists tag so others can discover your work. You’ll find more details on how the challenge works here.

John Steiner.