A clear, calm, cold day in a coastal area. Some housing developments nearby, but a lot of untouched nature. Snow is 24 hours old, up to 30 cm deep in places. Some footprints, looks like two or three people have been here since the snowfall. But nobody around now. The footpath leads to the water, but for good vantage points I have to stray upwards. Very rocky terrain. Depite spyky boots I have to tread carefully on steep grades. This is not the Himalaya, but even a short and sudden slippage could be painful.
From places higher up a gorgeous scenery unfolds. Camera goes warm. Hard to grasp that I'm still inside city limits. Quite a few times I have walked and scrambled around here before, but never on such a winter's day. No trace of a big city nearby, no people, no boats. A sense of "irreality" in time and place hangs in the air. An atmosphere that I try to breathe in. A spellbinding presence that's hard to let go, hard to turn away from.
Actually, the above image show is the second version, after experimenting with some image manipulation in the first one. Somehow I felt that the original images where "too close" to reality and not really reflecting a kind of emotional surge that went through me at the time.
What could I do about that --- Maybe this called for some kind of alteration of the images. A tweak that would give them a hint of "something else". What I came up with was a sandwich-technique, starting with two identical layers of the same image. The upper layer then was converted to black and white plus a graphic effect. This graphically manipulated layer then received a certain degree of transparency so the unchanged color layer shines through. Both layers then are merged into one. At least in this technical way a more literal rendition and a subjective impression coexist in the final image.
Initially I found the result interesting. As some time passed I got dissatisfied with the graininess. Particularly combined with some zooming and panning, the grain can be a bit irritating. Also, the effect works reasonably well on some pictures, less well on others. On the whole, this type of manipulation is most likely better suited for pictures printed on fine-art matte paper. But here is the first version anyway:
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