Something interesting from something ordinary ?

Hi All,

Here I am again with another blog post. 

This time I'm trying to take a fairly ordinary image of three services signs (water) and trying to do something with it to make it a little more interesting and maybe even striking.  I took the image below because I liked the way the signs stood in a row. The day was pretty cold with very little ambient light. I put the D300s on my Manfrotto Tripod and composed the image. 

The camera was set at 1/250" @ f4.8 with an ISO of 500. I had my Sigma 18 - 200mm set at 52mm.  At those settings I took the image shown below. 

Three In A Row

The camera was set at 1/250" @ f4.8 with an ISO of 500. I had my Sigma 18 - 200mm set at 52mm. 

When I got the image into the computer I still liked the composition but the actual image lacked something. There was a certain punch and vitality missing. 

I opened the image in Lightroom 4 and began messing around with it. I added saturation, contrast and Vibrance but it didn't do what I wanted it to do.

So I reset it again and opened it into Nik Soft's Color Efex Pro. I began to explore the various presets until I came across the Bleach Bypass setting. I liked the initial effect so adjusted some of the controls until I liked what I saw. Whilst in Color Efex Pro I added a small border and a slight vignette. 

The final image can be seen below. I'm sure it's not to everyone's taste but I really liked it. 

See you next time ....