Lessons Learned: Play with it!

There was nothing wrong with the original version of this image, a soft grayish foggy image with muted boat shapes in the mist and subdued orange buoys. It certainly fit the "quiet moments" theme.

But I couldn't leave it alone. I wanted more impact, more "zing" to the image than appeared naturally.

So I increased the intensity and color saturation until the picture you see here emerged. At the time, I had greeting card images in mind, and I felt this bright blue image would look good on the card rack while maintaining a somewhat peaceful feeling.

I especially like how the orange fluorescent buoys lit up with the treatment offering perfect color-wheel complementary accents to the blue. It seemed like a good opportunity to present this image in a stylized manner while retaining the feel of quiet New England morning.

In my opinion, this is one of the greatest advantages to digital photography. In my old world, I developed film, then dodged, burned and whispered magic incantations over my chemical-soaked images to put the finishing touches on them. In the digital world, I am almost without bounds, capable of changing an image or combining it with others with ease and capabilities far beyond old-fashioned photo finishing.