Today’s photo editing software has a great many ways to alter the mood of a photo without dramatically changing its details. I shot this photo of Old Downtown Vancouver at 6th and Broadway. This was just a typical evening scene with a soft glow of twilight in the sky and enough color to know it was still technically daytime. The original photo was used for a Condo I was marketing. This was the view out the living room window. It was a cool damp December day and the shot showed the view well. But it didn’t really have any character. There was no story being told. I feel like this image evokes Chevy Chase as Clark Griswold, looking at the Grand Canyon, yep… OK let’s go to Wally World! There is somewhere else to be. Another story to be told.
Long after the Condo sold, I stumbled across the raw images and decided to play around with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. I played with the color, saturation and all the typical enhancement tools. I realized that the photo didn’t need to be enhanced. It was what it was, a decent shot of the view out the window of a 5th Floor Condo in Lower Downtown. This photo needed to stop being a photo and become a mood.
So the above “original” was cropped to a 4:3 format to fit the local MLS standard but other than that not much was done to the image. I began to use color and luminance tools to alter the mood of the image. The finished product became nearly devoid of color save for the late autumn hues of yellow and orange. With a little highlight control the sky became angry and formed a more ominous blanket over the wet streets below. The photo began to take on a life of its own. It started to look like something was about to happen. What twisted tale or diabolical plot would begin to unravel with this as the opening long shot to set the scene. Sometimes an image needs more color, sometimes less, sometimes none at all. I ended up with about six or seven variations of the same shot. But this one is the 
one that seems to stick the best.
When I was shooting back in the eighties I would take a dozens shots with a variety of filters and camera settings then choose the best one after the film was processed. Now I can take one shot and process to the image I want. Six of one, half-dozen of another? Perhaps, but the real fun is making something cool out of something ordinary.
'Couv' Camera 