Post production

This picture was taken whilst driving through Holderness on my way to Sunk Island in late August 2018. The smoke caught my eye and the road leading to it curved nicely in the direction the smoke was drifting The trees either side of the bend provided a good balance to the emptiness on the right of the picture. The smoke echoed the cloud cover that day too.

The first edit was in colour and I cropped more closely (16:9) into the trees and smoke whilst darkening the exposure slightly, increasing the white so that the clouds would gain more definition and slightly saturating the colour. I also did a straightforward black and white conversion from the original without a crop or changing the exposure or contrast. This was later printed and shown in the Ferens Open.

When I recently revisited the photograph (lockdown gives plenty of time to look at improving older photos when you can't travel for new ones) I decided to see if I could enhance. The second mono photograph has been considerably sharpened (using Topaz) and I also applied a diagonal graduated filter in Lightroom starting at the top right hand corner. You can see the darker sky where I have increased the contrast and again darkened the exposure.

Whether or not it is an improvement is up to you to judge. As Ansel Adams once said " The negative is comparable to the composers score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways."