It's good to cheat....

I have no qualms about using digital manipulation to get a shot to work. I many cases, it's a simple adjustment of levels or fill light to lift shadows (my usual style) but on occasions I'll do a proper cheat to make a shot have additional impact.

Today I was out for a carp fishing magazine and with the weather being crap, we had tiny windows in-between the rain to get shots done. One shot on the list was feeding bait into the margins. I knew the focus was on the splash of the bait so threw the angler out of focus in the background using f/2.5. Unfortunately, when you're working quick like this you do hit upon mistakes that you don't realise until you get back to base.

In this case the best splash had the angler, Rik, with his throwing arm by his side so it just looked like some random stuff hitting the water. I knew I had another shot with his arm outstretched so that was a good starting point to do a merge.

I rarely use a tripod because I work quickly so there was obvious discrepancy in the angle of the horizon between shots. Thankfully, I'd shot wide to give some room for cropping. However, with the wind howling, the reeds where the bait was hitting was blowing all over the place and didn't stay still between shots.

The one point that was the same was where some reeds came out of the water (middle right) so this was the 'anchor' point, so to speak. If this point was lined up in both shots then i could work from there.

In Photoshop I overlaid the shots then applied a layer mask so I could uncover parts of one shot yet leave in bits of another. This merge is relatively straight forward; a gradient mask and then a bit of brushwork to tidy things up. The result is acceptable and although it's been Photoshopped, I don't class it as a fake - it's just a shot that I improved from circumstances that were hard to shoot in.