Well, the subtitle for this post should’ve been: “How to survive and overcome a Brain Cramp”. You see, I scouted this location very early during my photo shoot in Acadia National Park. I wrote about it a few weeks ago. What caught my eye was the very strong visual impact of those two trees facing the Atlantic. I made a mental note to come back when the light would be “interesting”. So, here I was, on day six of my trip, ready to take some pictures. Everything seemed to be in place: interesting subject, clouds, reflection of sun-light on them, dramatic colours. The whole nine yards. And yet something was missing. That something was my mental alertness. Maybe it was the fact that for the sixth day in a row I got up at 3:30 am. Maybe it were millions of mosquitoes trying to eat me alive. Or maybe, it was the good, old, Brain Cramp. Something I have been known to display from time to time. Regardless of what it was, the frame I brought home was this (not a final version from the colour/contrast/sharpness/local adjustment perspective):

What was I thinking !!! First of all, it was the wrong frame orientation !!! Should’ve been Portrait @#$%! On top of that, the inclusion of pine tree on the left-hand side of the frame didn’t add to the image, effectively diminishing the importance of those two main elements !!! F…k !!! How could I be so stupid  @#$%! That was, more or less, my first reaction when I got back home and started post processing of my images from the trip. Well, no matter how mad I was, I had to work with what I had. The first idea was to crop the offending tree out. The image got better (please see below) but not great.

I didn’t like the ‘squarish’ format of the frame. It somehow didn’t work with the overall shape of my main subjects. So the next step was to employ the processing power of Photoshop. I decided to “add” a bit of background around the edges (left, right and top) to change the proportions of the image. There are many ways of how this can be achieved depending on the version of Photoshop you have. I decided to change Canvas Size and then used Transform tool to ‘stretch’ the side and top portions of the image creating the image you see on the top of this post.

It wasn’t too complicated. Didn’t take too much time and in my opinion, the final result works. But still, I’m quite mad at myself for not thinking clearly when I first took this photograph. The fact that you can “fix” many problems “in post” shouldn’t be an excuse for sloppiness.

The last piece of info regards the location where I took this picture. I marked the spot (approximately) on the map below.