VSP Workshops Blog

Digging up the Past…

Been a little while since I posted folks…crazy year trying to juggle work with the birth of twins last Christmas. Anyway, I’m back and looking forward to getting the blog back into gear.

So to get things back into full swing I thought I’d share this little story about an image that I took back in mid 2009 in Provence. Up until very recently, the RAW file just sat there in Lightroom, un-processed, amongst all the other sparkly finished files. For the life of me I just didn’t know how to post process the file. We were shooting the wild horses of the Camargue during a workshop, and that particular year we had a cloudy morning for this shoot. The year before we had sun, and so shooting with the horses back-lit gave a lot of contrast, seperation between the horses and their background, and lit up all of the water being splashed around. No such luck in 2009 – overcast was what we had. We tried to get right in front of the horses and low down so as to shoot them with the sky behind, rather than bushes. I think it was the best approach, although the guy next to me managed to almost write-off his D3…(if you’re reading John, sorry about that!)
So the shot that came out of the camera was nice – but really lacking a great deal of something. Take a look at the sequence of RAW file below. I had a lot of frames of this sequence, most of which I can’t fit in the screen-grab below, but the key was the positioning of the lead horse. The people who owned the horses told us that it was always the same horse that had to be at the front…and sure enough it was in each pass they made. For me it was a close call between the second (top right) and third (bottom left) image.

Ok so I was happy with one of the frames, but at the moment it looked like they were being chased by an avalanche on an overcast day. And so the image sat in it’s folder, waiting for me to figure out how to process it. I knew it needed contrast, but somehow I wasn’t getting the overall effect I wanted. If you look below you’ll see the image I selected, without any processing.

Just the other day, I took another look at the file. For some strange reason I had a flash in my head of how it should look. It’s not often that it happens like that with processing. So often you have a general idea, and you chip away at the various elements like a scuplture. This time however, it was fairly clear – or at least much clearer than it had been to date.
The water needed looooads of contrast. The horses need contrast on their coats but not too much on the outline of their body. I needed to darken the spray of water to the left of the lead horse and then lighten the splash from the front hoof. Lastly, I wanted a mooody sky. It was cloudy, but I needed something a little more sinister.
I have to be totally honest here. It’s way more post work than I’d usually think of doing…but I like the result.
The workflow went something like this…

- Create relatively heavy gradient filter in Lighroom to darken sky
- Export to CS5 from Lightroom
- Create adjustment layer mask and lighten some of the clouds to create strong contrast between the top of the frame and the area just around the lead horse’s head
- In another adjustment mask, add a lot of contrast to the water at the bottom of frame
- Yet another mask I added a lot of sharpening to the water to the left of the lead horse – this seemed to work well at making the water stand out more
- Finally in another mask I brought out some details in the lead horse’s head…

(Note about the workflow – if you don’t know what I mean by creating an adjustment mask and brushing back in the changes then you really really should look into it – its just a really powerful way for you to make very precise changes – maybe we’ll do another blog post on that soon….if you’re interested in seeing that leave a comment below)…

There was a lot more tweaking than I’m detailing here, but that’s the general idea. The point of the post is actually more about editing and taking care not to delete files. I’m not saying I would have deleted this file – but it sat unused for over a year. Sometimes coming back to an image after a while can be all that’s needed to see it in a different way.
To give you an idea of what happened the year before when we had strong light, see the image below.
Careful with those itchy fingers poised above the delete button folks….
For all those interested, we’re going to be running our Provence photo tour again in 2011…info

JM