My dear friend Sven Kohnke is a talented photographer. He has come on a few workshops with me now and is always a welcome voice during my editing sessions.

I re-joined Instagram a few weeks ago (I don’t really know why I did so - perhaps I was missing being part of community? I don’t know). But there is a mini community of souls on there that I have met on my workshops. Many have become friends, as is normal when you run trips and spend a good week with a group of people.

Whilst on Instagram, Sven’s portfolio popped up and I saw this image:

The one thing I have learned about my own work, is that even when I think I can’t go any further with an edit, there is always more to do. I don’t look at editing as ‘fixing things’, but more as ‘interpretation’ and it is one of the ways in which we can impart a sense of our own vision and style onto our photographs.

So I set about playing with Sven’s image and this is where I ended up:

I felt that this version brought more focus to the work, while also lending a more graphic aspect to it as well.

There are about five or six main areas where I altered the tones in the image, but I wonder how many of them you can spot?

The ones that I would guess where you can’t see where I’ve change the image are, in my view these three main areas:

1. The base of the building is darker, and the top of the reflection where it joins the building is darker also. This is deliberate, and although may seem counter-intuitive, I have allowed the building and reflection to be more ‘separate’ from each other.

2. The building has a vignette around it. It is brighter in towards the middle. This has been done as a long tall oval shape.

3. The same treatment for the building has been applied to the reflection: it too has a vignette - but i only needed to darken the top of the reflection to achieve the ‘oval’ shape.

In my view, every alteration should have a clear intention. Mostly, I find myself doing these last three edits to help impart a sense of 3-dimensionality to the image. Gradients are one of the ways we can tell the viewer about distance and shape.

The more obvious edits are the darkening of the surrounding buildings to remove any distractions and allow the eye to settle on the building and it’s reflection.

One last thing, I moved the building up in the frame. I felt it was sinking (it is - it’s in Venice!), but by placing it above centre, it now feels more upright, more forward, and also it feels taller as well. The height of the building has space now to stretch down and continue through the reflection and have sufficient space around it and its reflection. Prior to this, I felt the reflection was almost hitting the bottom of the frame and in a way, was a little bit like an after-thought. The picture now feels as though it is about the building and its reflection.

“when an edit is executed well,
it should become instantly integrated, as though it was always part of the original capture”

Had I not chosen to show you the before / after versions, I think most folks would not know what had been done to the picture. They would just ‘believe it’. This is the ultimate goal in any editing we do. To cast a spell upon the viewer.

Sven is incredibly good humoured to allow me to edit his beautiful image. He is also gracious enough to put up with my requesting that I write about this edit on my blog.

If I have any single message to impart, is that editing is one of the ways we can help bring our work to another level. If we edit well, we can often bring out the parts of the scene that we know are elegant and beautiful, while at the same time quieten the areas that are less so. When we do this well, editing brings clarity of purpose to the composition. It achieves an enhanced creative focus.

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Postamble: You can view Sven’s instagram here.

I would like to thank Sven very much for being such a good sport, and allowing me to reproduce this edit here on my blog.