If you're a fan of horror stories, your mind should have a field day with this one. When I took the shot, I was envisioning an "end of season" type story and photo. The kayaks are all stacked, the windows and doors boarded shut, and there's not a soul in sight. Then I loaded the image into PSE and my mind - as it is wont to do - ran off on an entirely different tangent. For some reason, I started thinking "horror" and went in the direction of a faded and well-worn photograph of "that cabin where (insert horrible thing of your choice here) happened." For me, I envision something out of the Cthulhu Mythos slithering out of the lake behind me and approaching the innocently sleeping campers. But hey, I'm from Providence and Lovecraft is buried only a couple of miles from me, so my mind naturally wanders down strange alleys.
Post processing started in Topaz B&W Effects. I applied a Hard Minted Cream filter - which produced the wonderful overexposed and desaturated effect - and then adjusted the contrast, boost black, boost white, and adaptive exposure sliders. The rest of the work was done in PSE. I added a background texture in hard light blend mode to give it that cracked and soiled look. I then adjusted brightness, contrast, and levels. I lowered the saturation a bit and then topped it off with a sepia photo filter.
