This shot features the lovers statue, part of "The Meeting Place"- a work of Paul Day situated in the St Pancras international train station in London.
Artist Paul Day with his sculpture 'The Meeting Place.' Photos: LCR/Paul Day
The huge, 20 ton, bronze statue is welcoming travelers arriving to London on the Eurostar from mainland Europe. It features a French woman (modelled by Day's French wife) and a British man falling one into each other's hands after being departed for a long time....
I liked the realistic approach and the contrast between the modern statue and the old red brick walls of the station in which it stands.
Making this photo involved two challenges:
1) Overcoming the keystone effect created by the perceptive of shooting such a huge scale object from a very close distance. As I do not posses a Tilt-Shift lens I had to stretch my lightroom perspective correction skills on post processing :)
2) Creating feeling of depth and extracting the subject from the background without losing details on the interesting wall of the station. I used several different masks in Photoshop to be able to edit separately the couple, the wall and the windows.
Here's the sequence in major steps and a nice video to put it all together:
Original shot
17mm / 1/6sec / f4.5 / ISO100
Perspective control
Lightroom
B&W conversion
Silver Efex Nik Plugin
Windows masking
Photoshop
Couple masking
Photoshop
Tones & contrast
seperate layers
Photoshop & Lightroom
I really enjoyed working on this image- it was a coll process from the moment I visioned it in my head to the final outcome.
Hope you enjoy it too.... Share your thoughts and comment bellow. Feel free to like and share.
Cheers