This is one of my old, favorite photos that shouldn’t have turned out so well. This was shot in Door County, Wisconsin in August 2015. My wife and I were vacationing here for our anniversary and we had just had our first child.

We were walking along the shore, pushing the stroller and enjoying a sunset over the water. I had snapped some photos along the way, but by this point, I felt I had captured enough, our son was getting sleepy, and it was time to get back to our room and wind down for the evening. I had just packed my camera up in the camera back and we were just about to get into our car. I looked over to the shore and the colors were beautiful as the sun hit the horizon. I didn’t want to miss the shot and I also didn’t want to tie us all up as we were already ready to go. I whipped out my smartphone (a Motorola Nexus 6), switched to RAW capture mode to maximize my ability to work with the software, and snapped some photos through the leaves of a nearby tree.

The tree’s leaves and branches made a sort of frame for the photo and silhouette, but the smartphone couldn’t capture the colors as I had seen them. In the photo on the left, the original and unedited shot, the photo looks rather dull. I brought the RAW file into Phase One Capture One to recover the colors and push the leaves and branches into more of a silhouette, among other corrections. The colors I saw with my own eyes never came back, but I was able to create my own in the sunset with the software I used to edit with.

After I was satisfied with the photo, I felt like it was missing something. I browsed my other photos from the trip and felt a canoe I had captured in a separate photo was the missing touch. I brought the photo into Photoshop and cut the canoe from one photo and placed it in this one. This was the finishing touch.

Below are the original and finished images for you to compare more closely: