Arctic bathtub

This picture was taken in a cloudy midnight-sun night en-route toSpitzberg from Norway: after three days of sea we landed on a smallisland where just five metereologists now live (on the other side)together with the ruins of a mining settlement of the turn of thecentury. Birds and the arctic weather have reclamed much of what thecoal industry had built, and some oddities still remain, like thisbathtub which, with just some rust specs, survived many a miner (andboss) shed.

That's the original I took in the rather dull light, a cropped and B&Wversion is posted here...

• Do you prefer the other version or viceversa?
• How would you crop this, if any crop is to be done?
• How would you enhance this, if any enhancement is needed?
• What would you do with it?

Thanks for your comments!

The light is rather dull (for a good reason!), so you didn't have a lot of leeway to get a better exposure in the first place. My PS skills are not advanced enough to suggest any way of enhancing this particular image, alhough playing around with curves to bring out more detail in the clouds is always worth a try.

This upload is somewhat small in size - it would have been nice to see a bit more detail. For instance, the flock of birds in the background demand my attention when viewing this image. However, they're too small on my screen to actually 'recognise' them as birds, which made me think about cloning them out of this altogether...

Decaying buildings generally look 'better' in B&W, but that is just my own opinion. Duotoning could also be worth a thought. As for the 'arctic bathtub', there is nothing in this image to indicate the proximity to the arctic. This last observation comes to you from someone who once had a bath in colour, albeit not in the arctic region, though... [grin]

As you saw, the BW version was an attempt to excape the dull light and communicate something more about the decayed building. Actually, this one here is just posted to try and get something out of the comparison.

As for the sky my PS is close to not-existing, and so my motivation to master it, with the excuse that time is better spent outdoor. At any rate, the clouds looked more or less as they are here, hot hair was blowing from SW and on a cold sea gave nothing else than thick fog, occasionally, like now, lifting a bit giving this effect... So there are not so many details to bring out, I fear...

The birds were flying away -and fast- from the roof. Given the light which was there in the middle of the night (!) they are with little details in the shot. So that's a lost battle as well.

As for the tasmanian animal in the tube, I heard of the tasmanian devil. Here the risk would have been to find a polar bear, but she (because reports had a lost mum with cub, which arrived on ice and did not make it back for summer back north) was evidently bathing somewhere else. The comparison of the colour of the fur and the use of the gun for the two animals is left to you!