4/19/2009

Another Donnattor View

Another Donnattor View

If you were with me yesterday at Donnattor Castle, you’ve already heard the story of this rainy day (just hit the 18 in the calendar to the right). You know it was hard to keep the rain drops off the lens, and if you look closely you will see the evidence of some I missed in this shot. Still, the waterfall and the Castle have to be caught in the same shot. Mandatory. Wasted visit if not.

Sony DSC H50 at full wide. F6.3 @ 1/40th @ ISO 100. Programed Auto with program shift for the smaller aperture (and increased depth of field).

This is another, that required more than the usual post processing. The castle and cliff edge standing right up against the brightest band of the sky, and the water in the air even at that short distance leaching out the contrast, as well as the range of light…it was all well beyond the ability of the H50s sensor to record. In Lightroom I used 2 graduated filter effects: from the top to darken the sky by reducing exposure, and from the bottom to brighten and increase contrast. I also used the Adjustment brush to paint an adjustment mask over the Castle buildings and the cliff face immediately below. I increased exposure there, and added as much contrast as possible. Globally I brightened the whole image, added some Fill Light to open shadows, moved the black point to the right to deepen definition and colors, and used my normal Vibrance and Clarity settings for the H50. Landscape sharpen preset. Because of the angle of the lens to the horizon (tipped down radically) there was fairly severe vignetting in the top corners. I applied the Vignetting tool in Lr to remove that…and then had to unsaturat the specific blue that was still left in the corners. Finally I cropped out part of the sky to get rid of most of it. The crop actually helped the image by eliminating what turned out to be a distracting area of dead gray at the top. Win win.

From Scotland (and my last Donnattor Castle shot, I promise).

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