I took this image a few days ago in the area north of Toronto. In the town of New Tecumseth to be precise. I kind of knew about this area, passed through it many times but never had a chance to explore it photographically. As usual, I checked the area using Google Maps and decided that it looked promising. The terrain seemed to be fairly “hilly” if that’s the word. I started a bit later than I planned. It was already 7pm when I got to the area. It was beautiful, warm evening. It was quiet and peaceful. The only problem was that I couldn’t find any spot that would be catch my eye. I stopped in several locations but I didn’t like any of them. Finally, it was already past 8pm, I found this field with very interesting patterns created by rows of young plants. I wish I knew that they were. I must have skipped school when this was covered. At that point the sun was already very low over the trees in the distant hills, so I had only 10 min – 15 min to get the shot. I chose 100 mm – 400 mm lens to compress the perspective to emphasize the pattern. I shot several frames playing with various focal length, exposure, etc. This particular image was taken at: 200 mm, f/22, 2 sec., ISO 100.

When I opened the pictures in Lightroom this is what I got after some global adjustments:

It wasn’t too bad but there were some problems with it, primarily that visually this image wasn’t balanced. The next picture illustrates what I have in mind.

As you can see, there are three circular shapes in this composition. Unfortunately, all of them are positioned towards the right hand side of the frame. Particularly shape “B” makes things worse due to the fact that it is quite bigger than “A” and actually touching the frame, which gives it more “weight”. I tried to fix this issue by re-positioning my tripod but couldn’t find any new angle that would work better. The main problem was that outside of what you see in the frame, there was a much larger cluster of bushes and obviously I didn’t want to include it. In order to visually balance the composition I decided then to turn to Photoshop and move “A” to the left and to clone portion of the shape “B” out to reduce it’s weight. Once that was done, I was much happier with the outcome.

I also did a little bit of local adjustments in Lightroom. I wanted to emphasize the fresh green of plants by making the dirt between the rows a bit darker. The picture below shows how I did that. Red indicates where I applied the adjustment brush.