Neil Bellenie
About the Image(s)
We were staying at Gold Beach, Oregon and our hosts took us out on the Rogue River for a day’s salmon fishing. We were on the water before 7am with the mist rising from the water and the sun creating intense bright sparkles on the water surface. Everything else was muted. We were heading up river and I saw these 2 boats slowly going down river in strong silhouette. We had a good days fishing ending up with 4 big salmon. Delicious!
Canon 5D mkiv. EF 70-200 @ 200mm, ISO100, 1/500 at F11. All post in lightroom - the highlights and whites were reduced, some foreground was cropped out and texture was increased slightly. At first it was kept in color, however the lightroom B&W filter added another level of moodiness to the picture so I went with that. There were some distractingly bright reflections from houses high on the bank that were cloned out.
This round’s discussion is now closed!
9 comments posted
I look at the fishermen, afloat on some magical river, and imagine that their catch must be exgtraordinary.
So many pieces work in harmony here to pull this together: the mist, the dsark sky, the dark forest on the far shore, the fishermen and their boat seen only in silhouette, and the glittering specular highlights on the water.
I very much look forward to reading your narrative to learn how you processed this.
I do find the dark band crossing the bottom to be a bit problematic. Although it helps to define the river (there's a current), for me it acts as a barrier to entry and separates the bottom quarter of the image from the rest. I tried a couple different approaches to see if I could solve to my satisfaction. First, I tried cropping up a ways. I didn't crop all the way up to the dark stripe, as to do so would have created a harsh lower edge inconsistent with the feel of the rest of the image and would have placed the fishermen too close to the bottom for my comfort.   Posted: 03/04/2023 07:51:12
Attached is the original from the camera. My post processing is limited and is all in Lightroom. I used the 'auto' feature as it gets the RAW file closer to how I recall the scene and invoked the lens corrections for this lens. I then further removed highlights, moving the slider to -100. The foreground was still too bright so I used a horizontal filter mask and further reduced the foreground whites and highlights. The distracting reflections on the hillside were cloned out. The texture were adjusted (increased to +20).
I played around with the crop and decided that the fishermen looked more isolated and lost with more foreground. I then selected the standard Lightroom B&W preset BW08.
At first I did my usual 'let's move each slider to see what it does with this picture' and then reset them all apart from those described above.   Posted: 03/04/2023 15:47:20
Like you, I often give the "auto" adjustment a whirl, just to get a quick sense of one possible starting point for the edit. Sometimes I like what I see, sometimes not. Glad to see you know better than to take LrC advice as gospel. A lot of folks, uncomfortable with editing, just stop there.   Posted: 03/04/2023 16:09:47