Before/After "long walk home"

On the top of this post you can see the Before/After of my most recent shot "long walk home".
This is one of my favorites out of the snow shots I posted during the last week.
I like this especially because of the feelings of wideness and freedom, loneliness and coldness this radiates to me.

The day I shot this was the best one since the snow arrived.
It was cold, you were able to see your breath but it was one of the best shooting days ever. The sun was low so the shadows were endless. I really wanted to use this in one of my images. Actually I did it as you can see from the image on the top.
I needed about 5 tries to get the image I wanted (to be honest I hoped that one of these will be good because the sun was too bright to see just anything on the camera display).

The problem I had to solve was that I wanted to have an absolutely virgin snow surface so this scenery gets a wild and undetected look.
After the first try I realized that my own traces destroyed this because the second shot would show these foot steps and it wouldnt look like I would have walked in there for the first time (I hope this has been understandable).
I solved this by shifting the camera 2m to the left so that these old foot steps cannot be seen on the image.
For better understanding I show you how this looked like:




it worked out wonderfully and I had the shots I wanted.

Now about the postprocessing:

What can be seen easily is that I strongly strengthened the contrast of the whole image to underline the hard shadows and the contrast between the figure and the background.
I also overlayed an adjustment layer "solid color" filled with green-yellow and used the blending mode"luminosity".
I liked the result but now I had to think about the crop.
This image absolutely needed to lose space on the upper and bottom edge but I disliked the result when cropping it that way.
I tried these 16:9 blocks and loved the feeling of wideness it added to this image.

I hope you also like this piece of mine.

thanks again for all the views and comments here on my blog and on my flickr stream!

keep on clickin'!