Having battled with the harsh light during the very bright days in Dubrovnik, and having done my best to overcome it, I decided to sacrifice a lie-in for an early-morning photowalk around the city. Sunrise was to be about 6.50am, so at 6.30am I left the apartment and made my way out onto the streets of the old town… to be greeted by bin trucks and street cleaners all the way up the main street. Damn anyway.
The bin trucks weren’t exactly going to blend into the 15th century architecture that I was hoping to photograph, so while they did their thing, I headed towards the harbour in the hope of finding some early morning activity as fishermen departed for the day.
As it turned out, the harbour was quiet – I guess in Dubrovnik the main line of work is tourism, and so the harbour is mainly used for boats which either ferry tourists from and to cruise ships, to nearby Lokrum island, or on cruises further afield. The fishing industry seems to be mainly based somewhere else.
All was not lost though – as the sun began to rise (with still quite a bit to go before it cleared the hills that border Dubrovnik on the west), a lone fisherman set out, his boat put-putting as he headed out to see. And then it stopped put-putting. As he tried to restart the engine, I had the chance to photograph him with alternative compositions, using a selection of lenses.
I settled on a long lens, to remove from the frame any other elements apart from him, the sea, and the hills behind him. Much like yesterday’s photograph, a silhouette was the best option here. Exposing so that he was properly exposed would have meant losing all detail in the hills and possibly the water, and the early-morning colour of the sunrise would have been lost completely. The only way to keep that early morning feel to the image and properly expose the fisherman would have been to artificially light, and that was impossible to do at this distance.
Unlike the shots from the previous few days, where I had to get creative in post processing to overcome the harsh afternoon light, there is very little processing done on this shot. I guess that’s the benefit of getting up early and seeking out better light.
One thing I did have to do in post processing was to straighten the image slightly so the horizon was level. Turns out that my sense of level when I’m framing shots is between 0.6 and 0.8 degrees out… at least that’s what I found when processing my holiday shots.
Having taken this shot, and tried a few other things around the harbour which I’m sure I’ll post in the future, I headed back to see if the streets were clear of bin trucks. They were, and I managed to get a rare shot – a quiet street in Dubrovnik. As you’ll see tomorrow.
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