While this site is primarily a travel-related one, recounting recently-taken trips abroad and with an emphasis on cruising as that’s our preferred means of travel, it does function as an outlet for general photography as well. And sometimes, like now, I combine the two.
The good thing about looking back at photos taken in less recent times is that sometimes I’ll realise I can process the picture in a different way or even save it from the discard pile entirely thanks to one or both of advances in the software I use or experience gained through the passage of time. As a general rule I don’t delete any photo unless it is completely unsaveable and to qualify for that attribute that typically means a slow shot that’s blurred or has over-exposed everything beyond redemption. Occasionally, I’ll have a scroll back through my RAW images so that I can keep our travel Instagram feed fresh, and I’ll find a picture I overlooked before. The following photo is a case in point.
The picture was taken on our 2013 cruise aboard Crown Princess to Norway and, specifically, it was taken in the evening as we headed along Geirangerfjord. You can read about what we got up to on that day (a hike and a wander behind a waterfall feature) and see which pictures made the cut here: Geiranger, Norwegian Fjords. There were two problems with the picture I’d originally taken.
Firstly, the photo was very underexposed. That’s down to the conditions of the time – cruising towards a setting sun behind clouds picking up its ambient light while in a fjord creating deep shadows is a challenge anyway – and my inexperience in metering correctly. The camera clearly picked up the brightness in the sky and took a faster shot than I wanted. The untouched photo was very much a silhouette of human figures which was interesting but not what I was after.
Secondly, because we’d known the the landscapes of Norway would be spectacular, just prior to taking this cruise I’d hit eBay to pick up some cheap camera accessories, one of which I’d used a bit on this particular day: a filter mount with a graduated neutral density filter. I knew that the filter would allow me to meter for darker items in the foreground of landscape shots while not blowing out all the highlights in the sky but I wasn’t practised enough to realise that there’s a time and a place for this and landscapes without clear delineations such as a sea and sky or a field and sky run into problems with light and dark areas on items that straddled that central point; like mountains while you’re cruising through a fjord. As a result, a lot of the pictures taken had issues.
When I saw the photo this time around I realised that the white sky areas – thanks to me shooting in RAW and the fact that I always shoot 2/3rds underexposed too – might still have detail in them that could be brought out. It’s only in the last couple of years that I’ve got more to grips with adjusting shadows and highlights in pictures to play with the range. That realisation turned out to be the case so I was able to pull the sky back in and boost the vibrancy a bit. I don’t like super-saturated pictures or those that are obviously HDR as the final effect can be surreal, and edge ghosting effects (which are inevitable in any dark/light contrast areas to some extent) are typically jarring.
You can still see the impact of the graduated ND filter in the finished photo because the brightness and level of detail in the lower part of the fjord’s rocky face is more obvious than the dynamic range in the upper part will display; I think the drift towards purple hues in the top left is an artefact of the filter, too. However, I don’t mind them in this case and think the resulting photo just works and really captures some of that evening feeling cruise along the fjord without looking too fake.
