Cheat your ass off.

I maintain that [good] photography is lying and cheating. People don't care if you lie to and cheat their eyes. They do care if you're honest, and they manifest this by ignoring your work. All of this is immediately moot if your image is compositionally weak, but, that is a subject unto its self that deserves more than the casual reference I giving it here. Suffice to say, if your image is boring, there's no technique in the universe that can revive it, or, like my friend Paul likes to say, "you can't polish a turd". What it lacks in class it more that makes up for in concision, which, is a powerful example of composition. Get to the fucking point as quickly as possible.

Now,

Dodging & Burning are among the original techniques in photographic print production. They are techniques unique to photography, and they are powerful instruments for realizing a strong image. Modern day computers make the implementation of these techniques quick, painless, and [most important of all!] instantly reversible. What originated as a physical deprivation or increase of light exposure to a specific portion of a print while using an enlarger, by virtue of strips of card board, or plastic, is now accomplished with mouse clicks, without risk to the image, owing to the "command + Z" keystroke. I maintain that the absence of consequence has cheapened photography, but whatever.

Here we go:

Compositinally, this image works. We have a vanishing point, we have lines that draw the eye, there's shit to look at, and everything that could have been eliminated, has been (this image didn't start out square you know). This is hardly a perfect image though. The biggest problem is lighting. Where the alley ends leads to a wide open street awsh in glorious Melbourne sunshine. Fuck. Contrast up the ass, and all of it deleterious to the image. Fill flash? Yeah, it woulda been nice, but I am a student of photography, not a master.

Enter:

Dodging is the lightening of specific areas, for effect. I needed the wall on the left to be lighter because I didn't use a flash to try and balance the light at the end of the alley. This is what is called a crutch, and in this case, it is a digital crutch.
Similarly, I burned the end of the alley slightly to try and dampen the fact that that entire sliver of the image is unacceptably overexposed. You have to be careful not to turn white into gray though, because gray is worse than white in this case. It makes the image look dirty, and dank, and I don't like that shit. Anyway, there you have it, dodging and burning, a technique to get you out of the tall grass.