The photo is a deliberately underexposed shot of the water-front Vancouver Convention Centre (popularly called 'The Sails'), I originally took for the Architecture challenge.
By framing and cropping I tried to eliminate everything but its most striking feature, the roof. Several distractions remained: two tall cranes, parts of the top tier of the building and several barren branches near the margins of the picture.
My aim was to isolate the shape of the sails without including anything else and to do this within the rules and limitations set out under the Basic Challenge.
Photoshop CS:
• applied Curves and Levels to render shadows and dark objects illegible, resulting, however, in an overly dark and flat image of the four sets of sails against a nearly perfectly black background.
• further decreased brightness while increasing contrast until the background was uniformly black;
• slightly increased saturation (Master), then applied additional saturation to yellows and reds, proportionate to their respective brightness, achieving a marginal improvement in brightness to all areas of interest;
• proceeded to make further adjustments to Colour Balance with the same aim while being careful not effect an undesirable change of hues;
• proportionately darkened shadows while increasing brightness of mid-tones and highlights achieving a near-palatable image without the kind of pop it should have considering the repetitiousness of the relatively small objects lacking much tonal gradation and physical detail;
• applied additional contrast and, in numerous passes Auto Levels, Auto Contrast and Auto Colour, all of which I fine-tuned via the Fade command;
• cropped image slightly to centre the sails horizontally;
• resized, sharpened via USM and saved for web.
I cannot claim a single innovative technique or style. What I might say is that I exposed this photograph to suit my purpose instead of trying to achieve what is generally known as a 'good exposure'. If there is, indeed, something unique about the style of this shot, it is perhaps no more than to visualize a specific purpose 'before' pointing the camera and hitting the shutter button.
I have, as often before, resorted to the use of negative space to pop, place and isolate a subject. This in itself is not overly exciting either. What is different, perhaps, is the very deliberate attitude which prompts me to do such things.
I am very interested in 'balance', 'antithesis', this kind of thing, which, here, refers to the amount of black needed to balance a little light. I do pay attention to balance beyond a mere arrangement of shapes within a composition.
I never knew, however, one could achieve a brighter subject without increasing the brightness of the background by, essentially, manipulating colour. This, if anything, was innovative within the narrow confines of my experience in processing images.
While I am satisfied, technically, with this entry, I regret the excessive ambiguity of such an abstraction.
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I have no idea what this is, hence the name? It is a pleasing photo both in colors and effect. Had you lost some of the dark area above and below making an elongated image it may have added some more impact. Overall, a great shot. Good luck.
in a way the title says it all... im guessing its what you were going for, but as a photo I can honestly say that is not good imho (sorry if my comment sounds offensive)
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