High Contrast

There are times when you're walking about and photographing the world when you make a photograph that doesn't fully "expose" itself to you until you're well and truly home and looking at your images. No amount of pre-visualization or chimping will show you what you have until you start to work with in in post. Even then it's a bit of a hit-or-miss experimentation. This is one of those photos that ended up showing its "true" value in post.

The post work on this one came in two steps. The first step was to punch it up a bit in Lightroom 4.3 with Preset: Direct positive, and then dragging the highlights slider to -100%. Then I ran it through Silver Efex Pro 2, selecting #17, Full Spectrum. That dropped all the blue to black, especially the cloudless sky. It may not appeal to you, but I love it. And now that I've discovered this bit of post-processing hackery, I think I'll work even harder to duplicate it in the future. This is the time of year to go looking for clear deep blue Florida skies, especially in the mornings.

I like the effect as well as the composition, and frankly, that's all that matters.

Technical

Olympus E-PL1 with Panasonic Lumix 14mm lens.