Hokkaido isn’t all grey seas and skies. Flashes of colour are few, true, but enjoyable when they come. You can see the brilliance this field of yellow sunflower brings, catching my eye from the highway as I speed through a recurring thunderstorm.

But sometimes the colour appears, and nothing else. Take this second picture, for example. That’s a brilliant sunset happening midst a grey, growling sea. And the dragon-shaped outcropping of rock is a dramatic counterpoint and foreground. But this wasn’t just a scene I stumbled upon; this is a man-made shot.

As I was driving along the coastal road on a western peninsula of Hokkaido, the sun was setting and I got a shot of the dramatic rays of light piercing the clouds and the sea. But that was it: a great sky, and a fairly boring everything else. Then, about 5 miles down the road, the dragon rock appears, but by now, the sky’s rays had disappeared, so the backdrop to the dragon was, well, a boring sea.

With a little creative layering and blending, I produced the shot you see there. The images were taken 11 minutes apart, on the same stretch of road and in the same forboding twilight. The shape of the dragon is very real, and is, I learned, a landmark on this stretch of road. But the combination of sky and rock wasn’t happenstance. And the dramatic splash of sea, sky and colour, of my own making. The creative thrill of photography isn’t just looking through the lens.