The Digital Darkroom

Before and after

This image is a good example of how the evolution of photo processing software can rescue a poorly executed photograph.  It was also a lesson to me on the limitations of film (and even digital sensors).  I made this photo ten years ago when I was still shooting film.  The scene presented a challenging exposure, with a very bright sky and relatively dark foreground.  Film and digital sensors are unable to record the range of contrast that the human eye can detect.  Consequently, in scenes with a high contrast range the bright areas tend to be blown out while the shaded areas are simply black, neither with any discernible detail.  This is a very common problem in landscape photography, as skies are often much brighter than the foreground.  In the days before digital the traditional way of dealing with this was to use a graduated neutral density filter.  This filter darkens the sky somewhat while leaving the darker foreground as is, thereby reducing the range of contrast in the scene.  These days HDR (high dynamic range, to be discussed in a future blog) has become the popular way of solving this problem.  At the time I took this photo I didn't recognize the need for such a filter, and as a result my image had an overly bright sky with a too dark foreground.  My joy at recording a beautiful scene turned to frustration when I got my film back the next day and realized my mistake.  However, now that I've become somewhat proficient in Photoshop I was able to "fix" the image, ten years after the fact.  I scanned the slide to produce a digital image and then edited the file in Photoshop.  The result is an image that reflects what the scene truly looked like.