These days I'm finding that my ability to enhance images in Photoshop has increased significantly.  Clearly you have to place a limit on that - I am a photographer not purely a graphic artist - but it certainly helps in creating a vision. 

This image is one great example.  While in Montreal I shot a great set of images with our lovely friend Surlie, with her husband Andy and Emma Alexa providing invaluable support.  Indeed Emma actually posed Surlie for this picture and even composed the shot!  The background was quite a cool set of fountains at the Montreal Arts Centre and it looked good (see the next shot), but looking at this frame later on, I had a vision in my head that was very different. 

I discussed the ideas with Emma (given that it was her pose!) and after quite a bit of effort, was able to create the image I wanted.  The background is actually an iStockPhoto shot of Miami that I purchased, and the sky was a stock.exchange image of lightning.  Composing the three elements together (with a lot of dodging and burning, and adapting the layers to match in tonal range and contrast) created something that was bigger than the sum of the parts (at least for me!).

In a more subtle vein, here's one of my favourite shots showing the real background for the shoot.  I liked this but even at the time felt the addition of rain would make a big difference.  A fair bit of experimentation later, the second image popped out of my Photoshop "darkroom" :)  If you look carefully, you can even see the splashes as the "rain" bounces off the umbrella.  What do you think... which do you prefer?

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