Solitude

 A little bit of a throwback, and another before-and-after.  2 years ago this month, my wife and I tool a long weekend trip to Michigan, saw some kighthouses, and spent a day at Mackinac Island.  There;s several posts in the archives, seee them here.

Anyway, I was digging around on the iPad today, and found this photo from that trip.  It never got processed at the time, becasue it didn't quite "click".  Today, I decided that a rather dramatic crop might be a good start to what I felt.  So I pulled the image up in smapseed, and played around.  I'm pretty pleased with the inal result:

This is a humble little iPhone photo, not sure why I don't have a version from my Fujifilm, but I don't.

So, here's the sequence:  I leveled it a little, cropped it square, and also cropped tighter to eliminate most of the trees in the foreground.  A couple of tweaks to brightness / contrast to correct the camera's auto-exposure.  Then some heavy lifting that I don't normally do:I used the healing tool to remove the last bit of the trees, and a freighter that was barely visable in the (far off) center.  Adding a little spot-contrast to the kayaks.  And lastly, dropped the saturation a bit.  And that;s what I posted to instagram.  

I sent it to the "real" computer this evening, resized it to 1024 px / side, and did a little Levels tweak to true up the exposure on a big screen, and posted to betterphoto and 365project.

This is a LOT more processing than I normally do, but I'm pretty happy with the end result.  And I had funpulling it together, and that's really the point of it all.

Below is the original, Straight-From-Camera for comparison,