The Mediterranean regions are reknowned for rustic doorways and so when the photo a week project I subscribe to on Flickr announced doors and windows for week 9, I knew I had to get out in to the local villages around Limassol and find my door.

It didn’t take long.  Just a 10 minute drive away is the village of Episkopi where I noticed a flaky door with an old shop sign above it.  The sun was setting and the light on the door was just right.

Choosing my EF-S 55-250mm IS lens, which is a great budget zoom lens by the way, I took 3 shots and moved on to find another door.

This door though had a different point of interest than all the usual Mediterranean doors, there were no pretty flowers, no whitewashed wall – well it might have been a decade ago, and no terracotta tiles.

With the image in photoshop, I realised this would work well as a black and white conversion, due to the lack of colour tones.

The B&W conversion was done solely in Adobe Camera Raw.  With the original colour image already in photoshop, I went back to the RAW version and pulled down the saturation slider and boosted the contrast, then pulled this in to photoshop.  Doing it this way gives you fine control over the conversion and creates two seperate images in photoshop, so the second, B&W, image was copied in to the colour version as a layer.  Using the eraser tool, I removed the areas of the image that contained the pale blue paint on the door.  The effect is subtle but works really effectively.

The signage at the top of the image adds weight to the image, giving an image that portrays, age, dereliction and perhaps even recession.

You can see the full version of this image on Flickr