Give this NEF a whirl!

[Tristin]

Curious to see how the people of NG approach this.  Here is the NEF at default;



And the file;
https://ufile.io/wbw0m4tb

Nikkor 50mm/1.2 ai-s @f/1.2

Have fun!

[John Geerts]

A kind of natural approach....

[Fons Baerken]

My take

[Birna Rørslett]

Can be played in any direction, for example, like this.

[basker]

Tristin,
Here is my result.
Sam

[pluton]

I drifted in this direction.

[Tristin]

Keith, Sam and John - I enjoy the dreaminess shared and the choices in hue and distortion. 

Fons - Very nostalgic!

BirnaBjorn - I have never been able to stomach posterization, that is probably the one area our tastes just diverge.  The sky, however, is right up my alley!

[bobfriedman]

how's this?  probably should have spent more time on this.. 15min.

[Tristin]

Bob - Looks great aside from the area of trees/building where you cloned out the light.  Great job balancing the sky and the ground areas.

If you're curious why I included it in the composition, this was taken at Lake Merritt which has the lights encompassing the lake along the walking path and I want to reminisce walking the lake looking at the image.  Though I understand the choice to remove it.

[bobfriedman]

Bob - Looks great aside from the area of trees/building where you cloned out the light.  Great job balancing the sky and the ground areas.

If you're curious why I included it in the composition, this was taken at Lake Merritt which has the lights encompassing the lake along the walking path and I want to reminisce walking the lake looking at the image.  Though I understand the choice to remove it.

the whole cloning job was done very quickly to show what could be done. however, if the light was not distorted in structure-pole (I also perspective corrected the image) and out of focus I might have worked it in differently. I used luminosity masks selectively on the sky, buildings and foreground. increased sharpness and textures. clearly at wide open you going for that out-of-focus effect but felt it didn't really work here.

[Bent Hjarbo]

At last I got the time.
I used Lightroom Classic, tried with PS, but did not like the result.

[CS]

how's this?  probably should have spent more time on this.. 15min.

Best of the bunch, IMO.

[Nikfuson]

Me humble trial...

[Tristin]

Bent, the balance of sky and ground is excellent! 

Nikfusion, wow.  I hadn't considered BW for this image, but I am glad you did.  Very striking!  The cropped oar makes me bit my finger a bit though haha.