This image represents a lot less than met Steve Smith’s eye. Steve, who lives in Startforth, a village in the northeast of England, was shooting in Salen, a village on Isle of Mull off the west coast of Scotland, and when he came upon these abandoned boats he realized he’d have to do a bit of creative framing and cropping to make the image work.

The raw materials were there—the colors and textures, the potential for graphic impact—but so were a lot of problems. “There were actually three boats, and it was a horrible, dismal day,” Steve says. So he boosted the color control setting on his D300 to vivid, framed to get the best of the graphic elements and, later at the computer, cropped the image. “I took the sky totally out of there, and the coastline, and the other boat,” he says. “Then in Capture NX 2 I reduced the saturation a tad and adjusted the curves a bit.”

Steve had a AF-S NIKKOR 24-70mm f/2.8G ED on his tripod-mounted D300 and made the picture at 1/60 second at f/6.3 and ISO 200 with the camera set for manual exposure and Matrix metering.

Steve is an avid photo enthusiast—he says that 90 percent of his spare time is occupied by photography, and he sells flne art prints of his images through his website—but he makes his living as a car salesman. “Four years ago I was in the showroom,” he says, “and the service manager came in with some images he’d taken with a Nikon D200 of some bridges in Newcastle on Tyne. I was so impressed with the images that two days later I purchased a D200.” Shortly after that he received a D300 as a birthday gift.

We hope he’ll show this issue to the service manager who got him started.