Ah, Moscow: the never-ending greyness, the lousy weather, the winter depression, the bad air… I doctored up this photo in honor of all that. (Sorry about the lack of posts recently, by the way; there’s a bad flu going around and I ended up sick in bed for 8 days straight.)

Anyway, this photo. I shot it two years ago as a standard color image, in RAW format of course, and then started playing with it. The light scattering of snow and twilight lighting suggested something odd and murky and vaguely fairy-tale like. The lighting and my mood at the time made me think of living in an aquarium. I converted it to greyscale, applied distortion similar to a pinhole camera, and then tinted it in cyans. After that, I applied a “painting with light” technique – you create a new layer in Photoshop, set it to “soft light” and then paint whites and blacks on with a very soft brush at 8% opacity. It’s a nice way to dodge and burn an image subtly and reversibly.