Reflection Under the Bridge

I took a stroll around our neighbourhood park on a cold, windy day with the intention of just shooting a lot of photos. The object for me was to 'work the scene' and see what if anything appealed to me when I got the photos on the monitor later.

It's not a large park, and there's not really that much of interest. Yes, there's a nice pond, but with houses on three sides, it's not all that easy to shoot: especially when things get bleak in November.

There were some Canada Geese on the far side of the pond, and I took a number of zooms, but they weren't very interesting. I walked a bit in the long, dried grasses at one end of the park but couldn't find a very interesting shot.

The sun was going in and out, but when it came out, I saw some interesting reflections under the little footbridge over a tiny dtich that leads to the nearby pond. I thought that I could try to work with it, but it needed some tender care in post, as most photos do — especially if your shoot in RAW although I sometimes get decent results SOOC (straight out of the camera) even in RAW.

In analyzing the photo, I found five main things that I would like to change: numbered below.

1. This is to be the focal point. I think I need to brighten the reflection a bit and perhaps tone down the bright leaves on the bank — just even out the two parts of the focus a little. This could done in Lightroom: my goto photo editor. Some photos just require a little tweak or two in LR, but this would require more work.

2. This area above the line is extraneous to the photo, and even pulls the eye away from the focal point. I am going to crop it away. Also easily accomplished in LR.

3. The eye is always drawn to the brightest part of the image, so I would like to darken hilites like this one a little. Another job easily done in LR.

4. If I don't crop away this section, I need to do something with it. What I eventually decided to do in Photoshop, was to extend the wooden rail using the Clone (or Stamp) tool.

5. The boards are very unintersting. I was able to find a texture in Perfect Effects that made them better to my eyes.

Although I don't write down my steps as I go, that's more or less what I did, and the result is below.

You can be in a beautiful area at a beautiful time of day, and the photo is just lying there awaiting your snap. But sometimes, you are just carrying your camera around and experimenting. You get an image that's okay-ish but with potential to be better, and this is what happened that day. It's still not a WOW! image by any means, and I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't print it, but I find it pleasing enough.

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Some of you requested seeing the original image to the previous post, and I have since added it.