Forchu

I saw this shot in my mind as ~christineism and I passed through here a day or two before. I didn't have the chance to photgraph it then, so I came back to it. Wooden traps have slowly been replaced by more sturdy metal ones. usually you would see a few wooden traps among the metal cage ones that were replacing them, so I thought it odd that this dock was still using 100% wooden traps. They are deffinately a symbol of the rural maritime fishing life and I hate to see them become a thing of the past, although, the metal traps are better constructed and do not have to be replaced as often which is a plus for any lobster fisherman using them.

I walked down to the dock from my car knowing pretty much where I was going to go with the shot composition wise. I took the 10-22mm lens so I could exagerate the converging lines and give a sens that there were more traps than in reality. I decided to place the hut at the end of the dock of to the right third of the frame because even with converging lines I don't really like putting things in the center of the frame. I would have liked to see what the picture would look like if the fisherman who owned the boat had been at the end of the dock silouhetted in the hut, but meh. I think it's one of those kind of photographs where you would want to have a person in the shot to relate to the viewer. the photo somewhat depicts the life of a fisherman and it would seem logical to have one in the shot. then maybe I could sell the unmanipulated version to Tourism Cape Breton or something .

I did like the unmanipulated version of this photo as well, but I wanted to see how much further I could go with it. I was going for some kind of rustic, dreamy, moody, peaceful kind of thing with this photo if that makes any sense. I don't really remember what I did in photoshop exactly, but I do know that there were a few layers and a lot of masking done. I obviously burned the sky. and I did some burning on the left traps and a dodging layer on the right traps, because they were pretty much in shadow after I made a few global adjusments.

How I got that colour tone:
I duplicated the original layer (in photoshop of course) and I converted it to a sepia tone.
I then duplicated the original layer again and placed it above the sepia toned layer.
I then switched that top layer's blend mode to soft light. voila.

The rest is mostly dodging & burning and curves and such to get pump up some mid tones and exagerate some shadows.
I'll post the original file in my scraps if you wish to look at it for a comparison.

Thanks for viewing.

Edit: you can see the original image here, [link]