Houston ... we have a problem!
If you're just vaguely familiar with photography – hell ... If you'd ever seen a picture before – you'll notice that this is not ready for the world.
Obviously the horizon is askew. Now ... that is something I often do to ad drama / story / tension [insert your own bullshit here] to the image. But if you're going for that you need a much higher angle. Otherwise it just looks like a mistake.
So that had to be fixed.
And no ... these are not UFOs. It's just plain old dirt the lazy-ass photographer didn't wipe of the lens prior to shooting (go back and read at what time we got up).
So I guess some "dusting" was in place. An image this "dirty" takes some time to fix ... but it's so worth it.
Now ... introducing contrast
Let me just get it out on the table: I loooove contrast. And this one needed it. Basically what I've done it to introduce a lot of contrast and clarity to the image.
Furthermore – to get a "murky" and "gloomy" look I have saturated the blue tones. Because blue is more or less the only color in the image you can achieve great effect by saturating that one color and then adding contrast and clarity to the entire image.
Finishing touches
On almost all of my images I have a vignette. I use the vignette for two reasons.
- It often help to direct the viewers eyes towards the main subject in the image
- It often looks down right great
Since this is back in 2009 I would have used the standard vignetting tool in Lightroom. Nowadays I prefer the radial tool, with an inversed selection ... but that's maybe something to cover in a future story.
And just to finish off I brushed some extra clarity and contrast on "the ghost" to ensure he stands out.
Then I had my final image. The image I saw in my head that morning, way way too early, on that beach on the east coast of Denmark.
But after looking at it for some time and showing to some fellow photographers (the SplitSek crew) I decided that the ladder in the right side of the image had to go.
So it went.
back in 2009 anything above ISO 100 would be a scottish tartan of noise