Whenever I take moody shots like this I think about my friend who paints a lot and sometimes takes my photos and remakes them. I like them and I like paint but I can't do that. But I found myself painting this, making adjustments in Photoshop and Lightroom even though some film purists would just squeal. I don't squeal.

The lighting of the scene above looked more like the Fuji instant I took a few minutes before using FP-100C.

I like it too but it wasn't what I was thinking of when I saw the tree. I was thinking I wanted the weather to be crappier -- like my mood -- and I wanted it to be somehow nighttime and still lit with bad clouds and anger and catharsis. But it just wasn't that time and weather doesn't do what I want it to do.

There's no pure image. The fact that I was using a nasty expired roll of Velvia 100 -- a slide film known for super saturation -- and shooting it through a Polaroid 600SE is already a decision to mess with reality. And the fact that the Velvia can contain some levels of detail that you can bring out later in the scan and in software is an invitation to mess with it.

I scanned it twice, once with the histogram pushed to the left and once to the right. I used Lightroom to expose each a bit differently, combined the images in Photoshop, and brought them back into Lightroom to start messing with the colour.

I've come to terms with Lightroom's grad filter tool. With it I can expose the sky differently, darken it, bring out the clouds and tint the scene. It is funny but in my bag I had all the real filters. But just didn't want to try and think about the exposure like that. So I just shot the scene twice.

*I still cannot stand the paint masking tool, though. It is cludgy. For painting masks I will take it into Photoshop.

The computer is my developing station. I don't want to hear people talk about how it's wrong to do that. Just because it was difficult for people in a darkroom to dodge and burn and easier for someone in Photoshop to work it up with tools doesn't make it bad. Or to put it this way: your bad is not my bad.