My early-morning photowalk around Dubrovnik last week got off to a false start due to an invasion of street cleaners, but a visit to the harbour for some photographs at sunrise gave me something to do while they did their job, and soon the streets of the old town were almost empty again.
The main street in the old town of Dubrovnik is called the Stradun, and it was to there that I headed first on my return from the harbour. A benefit of my diversion to the harbour was that by the time I returned the sun had broken above the hills, and also above the western wall of the town, to illuminate much of the length of the Stradun, or at least one side of it. The dilemma for getting a photograph of the Stradun is that by the time the sun has come around in the sky to illuminate both sides of the street, the street itself is filled with people. I wanted to try to photograph it with as few people as possible, so this was a bit of a trade-off.
As usual, I had my camera set to RAW format. Without going all technical on you, shooting in this format will ensure the image that comes out of my camera will contain more detail in the shadow (dark) and highlight (bright) areas of the image than if I had the camera set to JPEG format. So while some of the street was in sunlight, and the rest was in shade, I knew that in post processing I could compress the range of these two extremes and retain detail in both areas. Had I shot a JPEG image, it is possible that I would have had areas of pure black in trying to keep detail in the sunny parts of the street, or vice versa, ending up with areas of pure white while trying to keep detail in the shaded parts.
In an ideal world the sky would have been a little more interesting for this shot – as it is, it is quite a bland pale blue. I did try a monochrome conversion of this image, and to be honest I may favour that more. I’m not sure. I think the issue is that neither of the images really wins me over, but given that I had set out on my photowalk determined to get a shot of the Stradun clear of people, I thought I should at least post the results.
Had I been dedicating more time to photography on my holiday in Croatia I may have tried again early the next morning, or spent some time taking night time shots, but as it was I knew that I had already captured a few images that I really liked during my stay in Dubrovnik and I was primarily there to relax, so I didn’t worry too much about the one that got away. Instead I started to wonder about the photographs that I might be able to capture in the national park on the island of Mljet, where we were spending the second half of our holiday.
More on that tomorrow.
i don’t know about your comment that stradun doesn’t excite you; i think there’s excitement in the obvious preparation for the day… i can taste the latte in my hand (and the ciggie), and the anticipation of the crowds that will descent… i love it. cheers
Oh it’s not that Stradun doesn’t excite me… it’s that this photograph of it doesn’t. I would have liked to capture that excitement and anticipation that you mention and think I failed to do so. Probably focused too much on overcoming the challenges of the lighting and not enough on making a picture. Thanks for commenting!
Ronan, maybe it doesn’t all pop but I can certainly imagine the clean air with a wiff of freshly baked bread.
Well done on getting the buildings straight and I like the leading lines.