Day 164: The Empty Playground

2026-07-20Hello!This time, the monochrome image is square. For some unknown reason, I chose to talk about Adrian Vila's square and monochrome photographs on a day I published a non-square image. Oh well.I feel weird taking photos at a children's playground, but it was empty and I made sure to get only the tic-tac-toe board in frame. Even the Originals files don't have much to reveal, so I must have gotten it right in camera the first time 'round.I should find myself a way to make tic-tac-toe fun — it's too simple and it always results in a tie. I know there are some homebrew recipes for more complicated tic-tac-toe games, but I need to search out for them again.Making this image monochrome resulted in shades of gray that I wasn't expecting, so I tuned the colors a lot. The reds of the board itself were tuned way down, with the surrounding frame being tuned down a little bit as well. I kept the sky about the same, but added a vignette around the square image crop.Finally, photographing…