Mono Monday Plus Sept. 27, 2010

When I visit London I usually land at London City Airport. Am picked up by a friend of mine and we drive for about thirty minutes towards the East. We go along a road called the A13 and on the way there is a sort of island built to keep the traffic in order. I was always fascinated by this and the last time on my journey to the airport I managed to get a couple of photos, due to the traffic jam. I decided this was worth doing something with. Here is the original photo in colour.

I transformed it into black and white, cloned out the street signs and then the fun started. As it always looked a bit mysterious to me I decided a nice mysterious sky would look better. I took a few photos of one of those sundowns not to be forgotten and decided to layer it with my traffic island.

Lots of sky and I cloned the tree away with some red from the sky so eventually I just had a photo with a red sky. I layered it with my original black and white photo and tuned the red sky photo down to a minimum just to get a slight reddish touch to my black and white photo, after all it had to reflect the sky. All this work up to now done in Photoshop CS3 except for the monochrome bit. I did that in Piknik as it is easier and does just as well.

Now for the action. I saved my monochrome photo with the reddish shimmer and then once again in photoshop CS3 did layering. This time with my mono reddish photo and the original of the sun down. I then removed the sky with the magic wand and blurred the edges just very slightly so that it didn't look too false, although the pyramid I left as it was.

I decided on a plain black frame around it, with a slight curve at the corners (after consultation with Mr. Swiss, my other half). Here is the result. I suppose the title could be "The End is Nigh", or "Sundown over the A13".

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