By Scott Shephard

Most of my photos these days are "made," not taken, which is to say that the technical and aesthetics aspects of a picture are premeditated and tweaked before the shutter button is pushed. And beyond that, almost every photo that I share has been worked on in my "dark room," which for me includes Lightroom, ON1 Photo 10, Color Efex 4, Tonality, etc. etc.

Generally, in "making" a photo, I would like it to seem like something you would really see yourself if you had been standing next to me. The test of this is whether someone who looks at my photo asks whether the pictures was "Photoshopped." I translate that as, "It doesn't look real to me."

But with this photo you really don't have to ask, do you? It only has the hint of reality. So why did I doctor it? Sometimes, I like the world best when it is soft, dark, mysterious and splashed with patches of gold. Don't you?

Canon 5D 1/8s f/14.0 ISO250 23mm