I finally managed to get out of our local virus induce containment this past weekend. We went for a walk by the sea, and while I brought my camera with me, I hadn’t really intended to take photos, so when I did, it was more of an off the cuff snapshot, than an intentional photo shoot. At first glance, the photos I took were pretty “throw away”, but after some playing around I managed to create a pretty good (in my opinion) image from something that started off as a dull and boring shot.

My photography has taken a real hit these past few months, for obvious reasons. Because of the global pandemic, we’ve been locked down here in Ireland for months, and it’s been difficult to take photos in that situation. Restrictions are lifting now, and I finally got to get out of my local area this past weekend. We headed to the seafront in a nearby town, famous for its promenade. It was nice to finally get some sea air and enjoy the scenery. I had a camera with me, but I hadn’t really intended to take any photos.

As we were walking along, we noticed that the sea was getting rougher, and there was a particular spot where the waves were crashing against some rocks. The spray was coming up and it was a little dramatic. Unfortunately there was lots of people around, so I took out my camera and zoomed right in to try and frame them out. The result wasn’t a great composition, and the lighting was pretty flat too, but I took a few shots anyway, for the sake of it.

I didn’t even look at these until a few days later, and the results, were, as I expected, pretty dull and boring. But I saw some potential though. Where the waves were hitting the rocks in one of the photos, I though it was some interesting texture in the rocks and the water, and even though the composition wasn’t great, I figured it was worth trying to make something form it.

The Original Photo Straight Out of the Camera

I first tried enhancing it in Lightroom. I wanted to bring up the colour and texture, so using various controls, I enhanced the contrast. I mostly used curves, the contrast slider, and I also changed the picture profile from standard to vivid. (I had shot this on my Nikon D700). The more important thing to do though was to change the focus of attention. As it is, when you look at it your eye doesn’t really know where to go, and so you need to give it a helping hand. The easiest way to do this is to use a vignette, but I wanted more control, so I went with a radial gradient, and then adjusted that.

My Lightroom Edits on this Image: Adding a Radial Gradient to focus the attention

The result was a little better, but I still wasn’t really happy. I thought it might be more interesting as a black and white, and I knew there was some nice effects in Silver Efex Pro, so I fired that up and used that to make a monochrome photograph.

The first thing I did was try the different presets, and straight away, the first one I tired made a huge difference. It dropped the exposure and added some contrast and made the ocean and rocks a rich black, but also emphasised the texture of the rocks and waves which was what I was after. I did some additional tweaking, using control points to bring up some of the brightness in the rocks around where the waves were hitting to add some separation and also to dampen down some of the water in the background, as the structure was bringing it up too much. This is the final result (also seen above).

The finished Result (Click to View Large)

I am much happier with this. It’s gone from being a dull “throw away” image to something that would actually look good as an art print or a spread in a photo book.

There’s a few broader points I want to touch on here, regarding both techniques and philosophy:

Someone asked me on Patreon (I’m paraphrasing): “how do you know whether to try and do something with an image or throw it away? In other words, how do you know if an image is worth the effort of trying to process?”

For me, it comes down to experience I guess. I’ve worked for a long time in visual effects and I have also done a lot of photo manipulation over the years. I can look at an image and see the “raw materials” in it. When I looked at the original here, I knew there was the element of something there because of the texture in the rocks and the spray in the water. It was just a matter of bringing it out. While I also knew that compositionally it wasn’t great, I knew I could fix most of those issues with some vignetting or dodging and burning. I know the finished image isn’t an amazing work of art or anything, but I know that its passable and useable.

The other subject I wanted to touch on is using multiple tools. I chose to edit this in Silver EFEX Pro and I probably could have achieved the same effect in just Lightroom. In fact that’s another type of comment I see regularly. Whenever you post about using certain tools or plug-ins, you get the inevitable comment of “you could just do that in Lightroom(or other software) - why are you using x plug-in?”.

The thing is, I probably could re-create this using just Lightroom, or get it near enough, but that’s not really the point. It’s easy to do this after the fact. But sometimes using a different tool lets you see things in a different way, or work in a different way, and you can come to a result you might not have otherwise. In this case, it hadn’t occurred to me to underexpose it like this, and just even having the preset come up I straight away got a result I wouldn’t have otherwise. Also, the quality and tonality of the blacks, wouldn’t have been immediately obvious in Lightroom. I could have probably created the same image using a different tool, but I wouldn’t have. I would have come to a different artistic conclusion. And this goes for all tools. As well as bringing new capabilities, they also bring new perspectives, and that can be as invaluable artistically as any technological addition to your toolset.

Anyway, just a few thoughts. The lockdown has me thinking philosophically!

Incidentally, I did a video version of this post for Patreon members where you can see my actual editing process.

If you’re interested in the NIK collection which includes SilverEfex Pro, I believe at the time of writing they’re still offering 30% off the collection.

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