This isn't quite what I had in mind for the concept but it's the best shot I came out with. Last day for the challenge, headed to a lake with the wife and made her the guinea pig.
Editing - opened RAW in photoshop, adjusted the clarity and vibrance a bit. Duplicated the layer, channel mixer with B&W - infrared filter. Played with the blending mode, opacity and ran curves. Duplicated that layer and ran colorize to a kind of cyan, and played with that blending mode and opacity and curves. Flattened, sharpened, resized, done.
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OK, first off, it's not a bad photo and an interesting, if not literal, interpretation of the challenge subject. The thing is, it's not a great photo either, which taken in combination likely is what sank the boat she was waiting for (I gave it a 5).
Reading through the processing you performed I'd be interested to see what you started with. I do a lot of B&W blend layers myself, though I've not used IR filtration/simulation on any of them. You wound up with a very warm image, which you likely started with given the position of the sun, and probably a bit too warm (verging on brown) for me. It's also overly contrasty, which in and of itself isn't necessarily bad, but with the highlights on her face blown out it just doesn't come together well.
How could you have done better? Angles and composition first of all. You’ve got your model framed about where you’d want her and facing in the direction you’d want, but I would have crouched down and run the water under her extended arm. This would have given you more horizon and “beyond” (which is where Byzantium lies, right?), and would have allowed you to put the horizon on the upper 1/3 line compositionally while effectively raising her arm above it. I think you might have been better off getting closer to her as well, going from the knees or mid-thighs up. While you lose the rocks and shore here, you gain the horizon and sky, so it’s a trade-off, but I think it’s better composition. A nice-to-have would have been a vessel of some type for her to seem to be trying to get a ride from. Even if one had passed, it would at least given the observer the idea that she’s not just on a rock giving a thumbs up.
I guess someone has to finish last, and if nothing else, while I wasn’t a huge fan of this image, there’s ones I gave lower scores to. Hope this helps.
Wonderful, wonderful Brown Ribbon: properly exposed, horizon squared, even putatively "meets the challenge", albeit in an offbeat way, and it STILL nailed the brown! Bravo!
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