Today I’m posting a photo that’s been a favorite of mine for quite a while. For me, “favorite” shots are not the shots that I think are my “best” but sometimes they are just photos that put me back in a place I love. This is one of those. I took it a few years ago near Yarmouth, Nova Scotia.

I don’t typically do a lot of post-processing on my photos. For the most part I want the image to look as much like the scene that I saw as possible. Occasionally, however, I like for a photo to “feel” more like the actual scene than it may have looked in person. You follow me?

In this case, it was a dreary, grey, foggy day (my favorite!). The photo, as recorded, seemed to hold very little color information. It felt dead. When I opened it up in Adobe Camera Raw I decided to push the saturation a bit to see what happened. I was amazed to see all kinds of color coming out of the image. With just a little tweak to the white balance and contrast, I had an image very close to what you see here. I think the only other thing I did was to add a heavier gradation to the sky to hold the image in a bit.

What I ended up with is a photo that looks more like I remember that place feeling than the straight shot did. Did the scene look exactly like this? No. But there is a kind of sadness to parts of Nova Scotia. Especially if you know some of the history. It feels to me like an echo of the people who suffered there in the past. Probably all in my mind but there it is. And this photo seems to convey a little of that feeling – at least for me. Whether it’s one of your favorites I guess depends on what you bring to it.