Before and After: Travel Diary

Sometimes I like to edit a photo to better reflect how I felt about it when I took the image, rather then have an exact record of what was actually there. The image above is an example.

Rather than go into detail about how I made the changes, I'll tell you why I made the changes. I was waiting for a bus during a busy afternoon in the little Italian town of Positano. Across the street was a stranger writing in a journal (or what I believed to be a journal). He looked like he was in a reflective mood after a long day of shopping. I waited and waited for the tourists to clear out of the way, but finally the bus was pulling up and I had to go, so I quickly grabbed this shot (I wish I had taken two shots, it would have made the editing I did later much easier!). A week or so later I was back home and decided to have a go at altering this image. I knew I wanted to remove the two people in the background and I wanted the image to have more of a quiet, melancholy feel about it. Finally I decided the man needed to grab our attention a bit more, so I changed the colour of his shirt and softened the focus of his surroundings a bit. In the end I have an image that says more about what I felt when I took the image than what was actually there at the time.