I saw this freeway bridge when I walked near the Trave River. Something was interesting about this bridge, I liked discolorations on the metal, the rust and the moisture on the material. I took quite a lot of photos from the distance and then close-up shots like the image above.

I had no idea how I would take photos when I was almost under the bridge but I did try to play with perspectives and thought I could decide at home. The photo above had the most interesting perspective in my opinion. I have now much more details in the photo with the new camera, also more resolution. The thing is that I can now go more crazy with Photoshop and Lightroom while editing images without destroying the image.

That means I have much more possibilities to play with the levels, with shadows and highlights or with the exposure slider. I wanted to do something crazy with the bridge photo. The image above is the edited version, I will show you the original at the end of this post.

I decided to change the image to black and white in Lightroom. I changed the regular stuff like highlights, shadows, blacks and whites before I did that. I also increased the clarity a little bit, just the usual optimizing. What I did next was to create different brushed with different exposure settings. I painted over the heaven with a low exposure brush, I painted over the metal material with a brush set to more exposure and so on. You can also set the brush to more or less clarity and what not, its a lot of trial and error to get to some results.

I saw this technique on YouTube some time ago, I tried this with my point and shoot photos back then, but that didn’t work out that well. Now with the new camera, there is so much more possible as the images are so much better. However, I still need to practice this technique in Lightroom. I maybe did go too far with my photo, I think I didn’t paint accurate with the exposure brush. Also I am not sure if I did use too much or too less in some areas of the images.

However, I like this edited photo much more than the original. The original photo is not bad I think, but I like to change things to give it a new look. But as said, it’s trial and error, you can not improve if you don’t practice editing. It’s the first time I use this technique, maybe I get this done better in the future. Now I show you the original photo and how it looked like before editing…