Walking in Sunshine

I mentioned previously that during the afternoon in Croatia last week, the sunshine was quite harsh, with little or no cloud cover and so hard light, with nothing to diffuse it.  Great weather for holidays, not so good for photographing.  But as I was there on holiday I certainly wasn’t complaining, and did what I could to work around it when it came to taking photographs.  On the return trip from Lokrum to Dubrovnik – a short ferry hop – that harsh light helped me create this image which is one of my favourite shots from the week.

Up front I will say that all is not quite as it seems in this shot, so while you’re dwelling on that, let me explain the process of taking the shot.  The scene is a jetty that juts out into the harbour, and as our ferry returned to Dubrovnik alongside that jetty, it was being heavily backlit.  The camera is looking almost directly south west, and at the time I took the shot that put the camera almost directly facing the sun, although it is high enough in the sky to be out of the frame.

Because of this, I was certain to make sure I had the lens hood on the lens – this is essential when shooting at angles where the light source is in any way in front of the camera to avoid flare and reduced contrast (unless you want flare for artistic purposes).

Also, with the strong sun behind the subject, and me quite a distance away, I knew my best chance of a shot was to expose for a silhouette image, rather than trying to expose for the heavily backlit people.  So I metered the sky, and for good measure overexposed by a stop and a half.  I didn’t dwell too much on the aperture as with a silhouette like this, with all the people roughly on the same plane, a large depth of field wouldn’t be necessary.  What I was more concerned with was the movement of the ferry (and hence the camera) during the exposure, and so ensured I had an extremely fast shutter speed.

That this fast shutter speed freezes all the action on the jetty is to be expected. That it did so with the woman perfectly in mid-stride is a wonderful piece of luck, and for me, makes the photograph.

Having got the shot, and seen from the LCD screen on the camera that it was what I had in mind, I set about thinking about how to process it.  By the time I opened it up on the laptop later I knew I really wanted to push the silhouette look to its limit and go for an almost binary image with only pure black and pure white.

To achieve this I first increased the contrast as much as I could in Aperture.  I then pushed the black and white level slidebars towards the middle of the histogram so that anything approaching white went white, and anything approaching black went black. Finally I did a straight forward monochrome conversion using the channel mixer to get rid of some hints of pure red that were in one area of the shot.

I’ve done this before, with a shot of a flock of birds over Timoleague in West Cork, and if you look at that photograph, you might see why I said that all is not as it seems in this photograph.

In fact the image above is a composite – two images merged into one.  Something I don’t think I’ve ever done before, but I think it works well here.

The problem with my jetty shot was that it was a wide, short scene, and unless I did a really stretched crop, it left me with acres of white in the top half of the frame.  My solution was to take birds from the Timoleague shot, and drop them into the frame, resizing them appropriately, and scattering them to give a pleasing composition, and hopefully a convincing scene.

If I’ve done that successfully you won’t have suspected the birds and the people were in two different countries until I told you.  It may not be to everyone’s tastes to do this – you may view it as “cheating” – but it’s one of the flexibilities (is that a word?!) that digitial photography offers, and in this case I think it enhances the image.

So that the technical details don’t obscure the shot, they are reproduced here instead:

• Top half of the frame: f/8 @ 1/500s, ISO 200, 70 – 300mm lens at 300mm on Nikon D50.
• Bottom half of the frame: f/5 @ 1/3200s, ISO 200, 17-50mm lens at 50mm, Nikon D300