What can you do when you have no image? You can always make one. Well, in this case I probably would have had a couple of other images, none particularly strong, thus I decided to try this one, an image I would otherwise have thrown away.
It’s an approaching tramway train, seen half through the windshield of a Vespa scooter. The focus is on the edge of the windshield.
The original image was pale, suffered from high contrast between the sky and everything else, and basically there was no composition at all. That’s always a good reason to go for a square, because it’s pretty hard to NOT find a good square in any given image. Here it was even the biggest size possible, in other words, I only needed to crop from the sides.
I would have had a standard composition with a perspective along the street, the vanishing point slightly off-center, thus conforming to the rule of thirds and … BORING!!
Why? Because it resembled the original in its accent on the perspective. It was not as bad, but due to the extremely shallow DOF, there was simply nothing interesting enough.
My solution was to go abstract by using the left part of the image, cutting through the vanishing point, using the upper right triangle of the sky to balance the red triangle in the lower left corner.
The rest is familiar: a combination of two versions from the same RAW, one for the bright part with sky and sunlit houses, one for everything else, over-the-top saturation with my standard combination of Hue/Saturation layers in different blending modes (see 683 - Welcome To The Republic), and then Alien Skin Snap Art.
This is a soft pastel effect with long, thin strokes, chosen to turn the strong blur into a whirling swarm of colored light. Actually it is a group of two copies of this layer, one at 30% opacity and “Soft Light” blending mode, the other at full opacity in “Normal” mode, and then the whole group at 70%.
The Song of the Day is the Duke Ellington composition “Take the A Train”, interpreted by Ella Fitzgerald. Hear it on YouTube.