Alone in the dark with the inner self (later edit:breakdown)

Today I am going to show you how I started editing my photos in black and white. I was asking @vonaurolacu what was I doing wrong with my photography, why photos that I considered cool or interesting are not getting any attention. He looked at my portfolio and he told me straight that he prefers a strong contrast and that I should try it instead of my soft and sometimes too clean approach. I thought to myself, man, I am always pushing the blacks and the whites to perfection so they are in perfect balance so what is he talking about ? I am very stubborn and I was trying to figure things out by myself through experimentation witch I found to be very rewarding most of the time. I started looking at some old pictures I made couple of years ago when I was in my first trip to the Danube Delta and I picked a photo that I made on the canals. A beautiful white egret was sitting in a pond with very tall reed in the background.
If there was to pick the most inappropriate conditions for someone to take a photo then that day would fit them all.
The sun was up and the shadows were hursh, the sky was clear, I was sitting in a moving boat with a driver not willing to stop or slow down, I had a cheap kit 55-200mm telephoto lens on my nikon d5100 and also I was inexperienced in a bird photoshoot.
So this is what I captured, I guess its a pretty boring and static shot that anyone can take.

As you can see the photo lacks contrast and colors are pale, overall not very appealing.
Lucky for me I was shooting RAW wich you should also use If you ever want to recover as much details as possible in your photos.
I am using Affinity Photo that looks a lot like Photoshop and has about all the features Adobe has but at a one time price of 50 $, you should check it out. I am not sponsored by them I am just happy about the product. Ok, lets get to work !

I started to edit the contrast and also pushed the saturation a bit to regain some color and ended up with this:

The contrast is much better but even if the egret pops, the background is still to distracting and I am overall not content with this look. At this point I thought I should try to apply a Black and White treatment. Well dont worry its not rocket science its just a button that you check and….

Well it lacks contrast now so I would better go play with the black point and the white point. Of course you can tone the b&w from their menu but this time I used these settings crushing the blacks and trying to keep as much detail in the whites.

As you can see the values are to the extremes and at this point the result is pretty satisfying.The only thing left to do is to clean up the image to get a perfect black.

For this operation I have used the “impainting brush tool” very simmilar to what photoshop offers for removing dust and scratches.
Well this about wraps it up. This was my way of editing and I like to think I did managed to get the most out of it in just a few simple steps.
I hope this will encourage you to start experimenting with your photos and maybe try to bring a fresh and interesting look to your photography.

Here is the before and after:

Thank you for coming and keep experimenting !