The thing I find most challenging about landscape photography is that there is very little you can do about bad light. For portraiture, weddings and studio photography you can massage bad ambient light by adding light of your own creation, or even kill it and replace it entirely with artificial light. For landscape photography you’re at the mercy, generally, of the sun, the clouds, the time of day, and how all three interact to light the scene. You can change the time of day, but there’s still no guarantee that the other two elements will cooperate. and if you stumble across a scene that you can’t return to, you have very little flexibility, other than simply not taking the photograph. And sometimes that just goes against your instincts. So you take the shot, and worry about the light later.
It’s not the recommended approach to landscape photography I’m pretty sure – a purist will not click the shutter until the light is just right, even if that means returning again and again to the scene. But when you’re in Donegal, and you know that there’s something about the scene in front of you that caused you to stop the car, even if the light is not falling nicely on the mountains behind the lake, you are going to want to take a photo as returning to the scene, any time soon at least, is not an option. And anyway, surely there is something you can do in post-processing.
This mindset is probably why I’m not a very good landscape photographer, and it actually is not the usual mindset I approach my photography with – I do like to try to get things right in-camera as much as possible. But having arrived at that conclusion, and taken the photograph, when I sat down in front of the computer I faced the challenge of creating an image which lived up to the expectations I had as I stopped the car last weekend to photograph Lough Eske.
My previous image of the same scene – taken a little further to the right, from a higher elevation and with a portrait orientation to the camera – was posted a couple of days ago after some hasty, preset-based, post processing.
The image above I’m happier with because I spent more time processing it. After some initial (pretty standard, for me) tweaks of contrast, white balance and saturation, and the addition of a vignette to frame the image, I decided to add a second level of post-processing and try out a technique I read on David Hobby’s website recently – even though he uses it for portraiture. That is, the use of a high-pass filter. I wanted to see how it might work on a landscape taken in non-ideal light, and in particular see if it might enhance the image or ruin it.
The image you see above has the technique applied with an opacity of 50% – which is to say I applied a high pass filter, and then effectively halved its effect.
I like the end result – it adds a little definition to the shot, as well as doing good things for the more contrasty areas of the scene (a consquence of that non-ideal light I keep mentioning).
I’m conscious at this point you might like to see the image I started with, and if you bear with me I will show you that next week – I want to take that opportunity to post a black and white version of the same image, and I’ll accompany it with a detailed breakdown of the post-processing steps I applied to get from what the camera saw, to what you that final image (a post-processing path which goes via the image above). I’ll link forward from here when that post goes live, so stay tuned.
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