Bog-wood on Lindow Moss

[davidedric]

Hi,

I think this is an interesting image - but then I took it. I would be very interested in any feedback. For back ground, it was taken on a lowland peat bog called Lindow Moss near here (Google "lindow man" for the story of an iron age man found preserved here). It's at least several hundred, and maybe a few thousand years old, but has been disturbed by peat workings and dried out.

Dave

[FrankMi]

Hi Dave, this is a very interesting by extremely busy image. I think it could benefit by increasing the separation between the subject and background as a result. If you can do masking and layers in post processing, you might want to try to play with one or more of the following:

- Increase the sharpness of the subject and decrease the sharpness (increase the lens blur to improve the bokeh) of the background.

- Increase the contrast of the subject and decrease the contrast of the background.

- Increase the saturation of the subject and decrease the saturation of the background.

Like adding a bit of spice, you'll need to play a bit and see what, if any changes would make it look better to you. The idea with a subject against a busy background is to minimize the background's ability to yank the viewer’s eye off the subject so you really don't want the change to be noticeable, just enough to look natural. That should allow the viewer to want to spend more time exploring all the detail in the wood patterns.

[davidedric]

Thanks very much Frank. Creating those masks will surely test my PSE skills (I have Elements 9) but I think I can see what I need to do and I'll give it a try. I think it will take me a good while! Pity I can't go back and re-take the image or something similar, but we had special permission to go on site on that day.

Dave

[FrankMi]

Even if you could re-shoot Dave, it would be difficult to get more separation between the subject and the background other than by decreasing the DoF and even there the results may be marginal.

[HMW12]

Once you mentioned the iron aged man - all I could think of was how the top left corner reminded me of a skelton's hand