Photo of the Day

This transformation photo of the day comes to you from the Corvin Castle of Hunedoara, Romania.

Being a photographer tourist at a beautiful place like this can be pretty frustrating. Most times there are lot of people in the way of your ideal shot and often the hours that you can even go see the place are during the middle of the day. This almost always means that unless you get lucky with some crazy good lighting and that you happen to get just the right angle of the building on your first trip, your photo will probably only be about 60% as good as it could be.

Take for example this shot. I had already taken quite a few pictures at different angles and had settled on this angle as a pretty good one. The lighting, however, is not pretty good. The sun was beaming full force and the sky is less than ideal. On top of that, there are a bunch of people in my shot… but this shot is about the best I had. Enter Photoshop.   A lot of people consider “photoshopping” a picture to be cheating, and they might be right. Photoshop is a whole other art form though, and it’s a lot of fun to see how far I can take a picture. First, the lighting on the castle needed to be improved. That is a pretty basic process and it helped, but didn’t solve the problem of the washed out sky.

I started looking through my photos from the trip and found this beautiful pre-sunset sky from another location in Romania. The process of switching out a sky is a little tedious but not too technical, but removing the people was a little more difficult. The Orthodox lady happened to be walking in at that exact moment, and somehow it seemed fitting to leave her in the picture. That little bit of luck brings a whole new dimension to the photo.

In the end, I probably spent around 2-3 hours in photoshop, and I was pretty happy with the photo. It’s not 100% perfect, but a photo almost never is. That, though, is the reason we keep going out there over and over.