I almost didn't shoot
this picture.
I was walking down a Montreal street snapping pictures with
my wife on a cloudy day in the fall of 2005 when my wife turned and said to me,
“You’re not going to pass that picture up are you”? She pointed to this bike rack on the side of
the road, it was horribly lit, the wall was ugly and there was coffee cup lying
on the ground. I thought to myself that it’s a really great composition and
proceeded to shoot several variations of it and thanked my wife for pointing it
out.
This picture is one that made me start to change my view on
the pictures I shoot. In the days of film I would have kept on walking and
looked for something less cluttered with better lighting. However I was really
intrigued by the composition and when I got home I started playing with it in
Photoshop. It took me many hours over several weeks to complete the picture but
it’s one that I’m very proud of.
Photoshop Stuff
I created a total of 8 layers by cutting masks for the bike
rack, the tire, the tire rim, the spokes, the chrome parts, the green fork, the
cables coming off the handle bar and the brake handle.
The first major change was to get rid of the horrible
background. Whenever I go out shooting I look for different things that I might
use as a background like brick walls, fences and cloudy skies. I save them in a
folder on my computer and seek them out for times like this. I tried several different walls and settled
on a black brick wall that I shot in Newport Rhode Island.
My next challenge was the bike rack; there was no direction
of light which made it look flat rather than round and tubular. I achieved the
roundness using the Bevel, Emboss and Contour tools in Photoshop which also
enabled me to give a direction of light to the image. I used the same technique
on the green fork to give it some shape and a direction of light. I worked on
giving the bike rack some pizzazz by modifying the color and increasing the
saturation.
The spokes on the wheel where very faint the only way to
bring them out was to cut a mask for each and every one of them. I gave them
more definition and contrast by making them a neutral grey. The other layers
were just minor color and brightness changes.
There was a time where if the lighting wasn't perfect I
wouldn't click the shutter, now I never pass up a great composition.
