I had to come up with a backup plan due to all the rain, so I went with solarization this week. It's a phenomenon that goes back to the earliest days of film photography when they discovered that exposing partially developed film to another light source messes with tonality. They would end up with things like the sun looking black instead of white. In the digital age, of course, the processing stage between capturing the scene and having the resulting photo ready is nearly instantaneous in most cases. So the solarization effect has to be achieved by messing around with a curves layer in Photoshop. Normally, a curves layer is considered one tool for adjusting overall exposure on an image, but because changes are made via a line on a graph instead of a slider, there are a huge number of possible permutations you can end up with by playing around with the shape of the line. This one was roughly "W" shaped, for example.
I think in general, I tend to prefer effects like this added selectively instead of globally to the whole image, something that's been the case for me for a long time now. (This one would have fit seamlessly into my Tafe portfolio.) Somewhat ironically I would argue that using such things in a limited way actually helps highlight them better than if the whole image looked like that, because it looks out of place. Compare that to an entirely solarized image, and I suspect you would become desensitized to the effect more quickly and therefore be more inclined to move on. In the age of Instagram, among the most impressive feats I can aspire to is to create an image that can hold someone's attention for longer than a couple seconds.
EXIF data:
1/200, f/7.1, ISO 100
154mm focal length
1/200, f/7.1, ISO 100
154mm focal length