Bridge To Neverland

The Story
It was a Sunday afternoon in the end of 2008's summer. I had finished lunch and was in my kitchen in Corroios (near Almada, Portugal) doing the dishes. I live in an 8th floor of a building that is on a top of a small hill and I have a great view that reaches the "25 de Abril" bridge (that connects Lisboa to Almada over the Tejo river) and the "Cristo-Rei" sanctuary. I was looking at the window and one time I noticed that I stopped seeing the bridge. I looked carefully and I realized that the Tejo river was covered with a thick fog that was hidding the bridge. I quickly finished what I was doing and said to myself: "I must pick the gear and head straight to Cristo-Rei! It's today!"
The "Cristo-Rei" is a religious monument, similar to "Cristo Redendor" in Rio de Janeiro, that has an observatory deck in the top at an altitude of 184 m (604 ft). From this place we can see the Tejo river and Lisboa. We can also see the "25 de Abril" bridge that is very near. I remember that I went there when I was a child but never had returned.
I arrived at the monument and sometimes I couldn't even see the bridge because of the fog. I took some photos from ground level and head straight to the top. From there the view was breathtaking.
In the hour that I've been there, I took over 100 photos.

Equipment / Technical Info
Nikon D80
Sigma 10-20mm F4-5.6 EX DC

Shutter Speed: 1/320 second
Aperture: F/8.0
Focal Length: 11 mm
ISO Speed: 100

Original Photo


Post Processing
Funny enough, this photo was my third choice from the ones I've published from that afternoon.
Although it was taken on Sep 21, 2008, I just decided to give it a chance 3 months later.
This situation happens me a lot. I go to some place, take some photos, rush to the computer to choose some to publish and the ones I choose some months later are the best.
Back to post processing, I imported the NEF file into Lightroom and started to play around with some presets I found on the net. In this one I ended using a custom preset from some other photo of mine that was itself already based on another preset from Mike Lao (you can find it here: http://inside-lightroom.com/?page_id=11) - 300 V1.
After applying the 300 preset, I've converted to grayscale and played around with gray levels. I mainly darkened the blues, but also made slight adjustments to the other levels.
Then I decreased the Exposure, increased the Recovery and the Sharpening.
And that was it for Lightroom. I then exported it as a PSD file and opened it in CS3.
In CS3, I've done an Auto Levels and an Auto Contrast, inserted a Gradient (90º, reflected, B&W) in Multiply mode and adjusted the opacity to 15%.
This gave me the full size (10Mp) final image.
I usually publish my photos with 1024px in the largest size and use a great Photoshop action by Manyk to do the re-size.
You can find it here: http://manyk.deviantart.com/art/Web-Sharpening-with-Photoshop-29038461

Final Photo


Link to image
http://jpgmn.deviantart.com/art/Bridge-To-Neverland-107002536