What I miss most about the area is the romantic notion of everything being raw; psychedelic spray-pained murals, multi-cultured friendly and approachable people, coffee shops decorated with local artists work, and last but not least the amazing restaurants.

The rawness however, is changing in Williamsburg as with many other artist-packed neighborhoods around the country. At first the new condos popping up all over the place in a way complemented the neighborhood; they’d occupy some old run down parking lot which no one ever payed attention to. Unfortunately, the sky rises that began their development by the water in a way started a more major transformation of the neighborhood.

The starving artists of the early 90’s, helped to romanticize the culture of art and music in Williamsburg the very same way  SoHo in Manhattan was transformed by artists in the mid 80’s. Their impact on these neighborhoods is now being tarnished by the rapid new development. I’m glad I got to experience some of that rawness. I miss it.

The original image at top, which I’ve taken 2 summers ago at night, suffers heavily from bad lighting and under exposure. After just a few minutes in Adobe Lightroom, correcting the exposure, adjusting the color, and intensifying some of the highlights, the image at left shows the outcome. The aqua-green tone highlights appearing on the columns are intensified and the red steel bars running across the bridge are heavily saturated and set to proper red hue. Other corrections feature the removal of cigarette butts and various glass and garbage on the asphalt seen in the foreground.

I learned later on this year that the beach has been completely demolished by numerous storms that hit the island during Fall – just a few months after I’ve taken these shots. I’m anxious to take new shots of the remnants of the beach this summer and I’ll be sure to follow up to this post.