Obviously this is a highly manipulated image, made up more out of my imagination than reality.
The actual location where the original photograph was taken is strange enough in itself, on the outer wall of the Marine Lake at West Kirby on the Wirral.
My wife Liz and I were out for an afternoon walk around the lake, which is one of our regular haunts (great coffee!).
The arrangement of the path, sun, cloud and lake struck me as quite surreal, a pattern of light and dark triangles, so of course I took a photo, using negative exposure compensation and a small f22 aperture to aid contrast and to enhance the appearance of the sun.
In viewing the file in Photoshop back at base it looked nice enough as a normal image, but lacked the dynamic impact that actually seeing the scene had originally impressed me with.
So I decided to see how far I could push the final image in PhotoShop to add back that impact and surrealism that was lacking.
It turned out that with a conversion to monochrome I could push the final composition quite a long way before the tones completely fell apart, which gave me the impact I was looking for.
Filename - path sun cloud 01.jpg
Camera - Canon EOS 5D
Lens - 24-105mm zoom @ 24mm
Exposure - 1/60sec @ f22, ISO100
Location - West Kirby Marine Lake, Wirral
This image - 800x533px JPEG
Conversion - ACR & PS-CS2
Comments - Small aperture used to enhance sunburst.
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