Back to manipulation

I started off my digital creative career 8 years ago as a photo manipulator and retoucher before moving onto photography.  The main reason that i changed is the fact that i got fed up having to search and pay for stock photos to use in my art so in 2008 i borrowed some cash from the olds and bought my first D-SLR.  Naively i thought that photography was easy and was soon proved very wrong.  I stuck at it, motivated by the fact that it was going to save me shit loads of cash and that i was fairly good with technology.  There were times when i could have thrown the bloody thing off of the nearest cliff but slowly it started to come together and i enjoyed the photography more than the digital art and manipulation.  So for the past few years i have concentrated on taking photos and have neglected the digital manipulation side of it, until now!  After exhausting nearly every location in the west of Cornwall i've found myself bored of the usual landscape shots and last night produced my first serious piece of digital manipulation for almost 5 years.  The picture below consists of a  photo i took a couple of years ago after i got run over and 6 hours manipulation in photoshop.  Click it and it gets bigger ;)

I still did the odd retouching either for models i know or other people but i sometimes find it tedious and repetitive.