At the beginning of each month, the One Photo Focus project hosted by Stacy Fischer at Visual Venturing challenges participants from all over the world to edit a single image.  This month the original image is kindly provided by Laura Macky.  

Original Image

As soon as I saw Laura’s image of the derelict boat, I knew this was right up my alley: nautical theme, shipwreck, sand banks…  So I let my imagination run and made up a story of a vessel transporting merchandise and coming to grief on a sandbank in bad weather.

This guided my decisions and the process I followed:

• Aged the overall image by adding two textures from Litl Owl;  the first one I chose was blueish, giving a water stained effect.  I blended it to the original at 60% opacity in soft light mode;  the second texture I chose added a rust tone – what salt water does to a ship with time. I blended this one at 80% opacity also in soft light mode.
• Went looking for some calligraphy and was lucky to find an old receipt in French with the word “transport”, also from my Litl Owl stash.
• Applied a mask to the receipt and brushed off the edges to soften and face them so they would blend into the background.

Here is the result:

I knew I had made a reasonable edit when my partner Wade went past and said “Ooh, really nice effect!  I can’t remember seeing this old wreck!”  But we could have.  Here is one we did see!

Wreck at Fraser Island – Great Sandy Straits

Thank you Laura for letting us play with your photo, and many thanks to Stacy for coordinating this photo editing project.  It is always good to see how different photographers interpret a single image.  To see how other participants have dealt with the boat wreck, click on this link to Stacy’s post.