AustralianPhotography

Hi Antonia,

I have seen quite a few pier photos over the years but this one is rather special. Although many people will be seduced by the converging lines of the pier, what makes the photo special for me is a small boat parked next to the shed, and the small dog that seems to be waiting obediently for its owner to arrive home.

As much as I love the pier, I think if you are going to include all 50 metres of it, from your feet through to the shore, you need to make an effort to get the depth of field right. If you have a look at the foreground you will notice it is out of focus; if however you had put the camera on a tripod and used a small aperture (such as f16) you would have got the entire jetty in focus.

Given that the element that is of most interest in this photograph is the shed and the area around it I would be inclined to crop half of the pier out and just leave the top half of the photograph… in the example I have cropped the image to a square.

Now, lets talk about selective colour! Desaturating an image to black-and-white and just leaving one single area at the picture of colour is a technique that has been about for ever, so much so that I would call it passé. Like anything though, I believe that such ideas should be adopted into then made your own.

What I am going to propose you do with this image is to leave everything as it is at the moment, then add a new layer upon which you are going to hand colour the rest of the photograph back in.

The advantage in doing this is that, unlike just reducing the saturation, you can actually take control of the other colours in the photograph. If you are not happy with the colours of the trees, change them! If the water is looking a little bit muddy, make it blue!

Like selective colouring an image, hand colouring has also been around forever, though it's not as widely used. I would try combining the two techniques to discover for yourself what is possible.

With the image below, I created a new layer in Photoshop and then used the paintbrush tool to paint the different colours that I wanted to add to the photograph. To ensure you can see the colours over the image, you will need to adjust the layer blending option to ”Overlay” and then adjust the opacity to suit.

Had some fun experimenting with this image,

cheers, Anthony.

Image Doctor's edited version