swimming across a road up a hill

This is an image that has been in my mind for at least 20 years. But I’ve never really just found the right combination of images to do what I wanted to do. I love creative imagery and art-working. It is what I spend my days doing, but not all images are as fun as this one!

Then the other day, for the first time, I was browsing through unsplash.com and there they were! Exactly what I was looking for.

I saw the road image by Natasha Miller https://www.tashography.com/ and immediately knew it was time for this image to come to life. Luckily Jakob Owens http://www.directorjakobowens.com/ had uploaded the image of the swimmer. So that was it. This comp had to be done!

I made the image a meter wide (11800px). Why I like working on such big creative art-working images, still baffles me. Maybe because I get so much more detail. And of course, I love storing 6gb files!

Starting with the road image, I really just gave it a clean-up. Removing stones and reshaping some grasses that sat near the edges of the road. Nothing was really wrong with it at all. Super shot!

I created some additional river all up the road, just to make it look like the water was slightly running over the road. Madly, I deliberated for ages (and still do) whether I should remove the broken reed on the bottom left. and ease the darker soil on the right bend.

Then I popped in our swimmer. Attempting to get the look and feel just right. I liked him swimming across the road. For me, it made the image a bit more abstract. I played around with the opacity of the water in areas, Brightnening and darkening parts, boosting highlights.

These images were made for each other.

I did a slight recolour to the sky and boosted the mood of the image by adding a bit of sunlight and very very slight lens flare.

And that was it. Many hours later it was done.

Swimmer image: Jakob Owens http://www.directorjakobowens.com/

swimmer swimming across a lake photography - jakob owens retouching bill greenwood

Road image: Natasha Miller https://www.tashography.com/

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