The perfect composition - Photo Story by Thomasarnestad

I got up 5.30 AM as the sun rose and got straight to it. I got in many good shots and was already satisfied as I sat down on a bench by the Daugava River to have a rest. That's when I saw this railway bridge and the communication tower in the back. From where I sat it was in a more diagonal angle, so I got up and started running towards the bridge looking at my watch, only 30 minutes until I had to be back at the hotel. As I got closer to the middle of a the nearby bridge I saw the composition falling into place. When I got the communication tower just in the middle I was set to go. I had a few test runs with the difficult lighting as the sunlight was breaking through the clouds straight at me. I figured out my best shot at this was to get a silhouette shot and try to keep the details in the dramatic clouds. As everything was coming into place a train came in from the right and I had a big smile on my face, perfect! The composition was as good as it could be for me at that moment. I snapped several shots as the train moved by and ran happily all the way back to our hotel and met my girl for breakfast! The best shots are the ones you have to fight for!! I've flipped the image horizontally afterwards to get the train moving in from the left as this seems more right. I've also desaturated the image a bit and added a Sepia filter to it, then saturated it a bit back and also added more highlights in the shadows in the clouds to get them more dramatic.

This image is from Riga, the capitol of Latvia. Latvia is one of the Baltic countries, former Soviet Union (USSR). I was there on a trip in April this year and had a blast shooting great architecture for a few days. However, when I was uploading a few days of shooting to my laptop one evening I realized I had been shooting compressed JPEG's all the time instead of RAW. I was furious at myself, how could I not have seen... I had shot almost 700 images already, and to me it was now considered scrap. Before we went to Riga, I had a deal with my girlfriend that I was "allowed" to focus on shooting photos a few days and the rest of the stay was for pleasure and being together time. Well, the shooting days were already gone and what was I to do? I decided to get up really early the next morning, and I planned my route depending on the light for the next morning.