Sometimes it pays to take a second look….
…. or a third…. or a fourth… or….
Sometimes we go out to a location that we’ve read about, researched, investigated and are full of hope for a positive experience and bringing back some terrific photographs. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. At least not on the first look.
A couple years ago, in mid-September, I was on a trek up in the Bruce Peninsula working on my lighthouse project. From Tobermory, I took the ferry over to Manitoulin Island and my initial plan was to take the ferry back to Tobermory to make the trip home. While on Manitoulin, I decided I’d drive off the north end of Manitoulin and come around the top of Lake Huron so I could hit Killarney and the lighthouse there. With this change in plan, I spent the next couple nights researching other places I could stop and found Chutes Provincial Park. It was in the opposite direction I wanted to go but it looked like a great spot for flowing water and waterfall shooting so I decided to make the detour. The park is located just outside of Massey, ON. The day started out well. Fantastic sunrise that allowed me to get some interesting shots of the swing bridge (one of the few remaining in operation and one of the oldest) at Little Current on Manitoulin and some good shots of the lighthouse on Strawberry Island and I was fortunate have one of the Strawberry Island light shots grace the cover of Dreamscapes Travel & Lifestyle Magazine.
As the day went on, it began to cloud over and become more overcast. When I got to Chutes, it was pretty much completely cloudy and threatening rain. A bit of blue sky popped out occasionally but not for long. Flat, uninteresting light. I decided that I’d try to shoot with as little sky in the shots as possible, concentrating on the river, rapids, waterfalls and autumn colours. I also decided that I’d shoot with HDR in mind. Not because of the need for a wider dynamic range but rather because of the detail enhancing capabilities of HDR that might help ‘perk’ up some of the images and better allow me to ‘create’ contrast after the fact.
I spent a few hours in the park, hiking the Twin Bridges Trail which is about 3.5 to 4 miles in length round trip. Looking at the shots later that night in my hotel on the laptop, I wasn’t thrilled with what I had. It seemed that I hadn’t captured what I had envisioned as I was setting up the shots. Even processing some HDRs I wasn’t getting anything that really enthused me.
After coming back home, I worked on some of the images again on my desktop computer. Better screen, better calibration, more accurate colours and contrast. Maybe that was the problem. Nope. Still wasn’t getting results that I was anywhere close to pleased with. I didn’t toss the images in the Recycle Bin; however.
Things change over time. Our perspectives change. Our skill set changes. We learn new tricks. We become more comfortable with things like HDR or more advanced digital darkroom tools as we learn more and use them more.
In the past few days, I decided to have another go with some of these shots from Chutes. The single images still weren’t doing it for me. Off to HDR-land we go. When I first took these photos HDR was new to me and I struggled mightily with tonemapping. Over time as I’ve used HDR more I’ve become more comfortable with it (although still not overly good) and was able to end up with some tonemapped images that were at least closer to what I had visualized initially and that were something I could work with.
Various other editing tools were used to come up with the final versions. Masking parts of single images into the tonemapped files, Hue/Saturation adjustment layers, High Pass sharpening layers with parts of the image masked out for selective sharpening, and then in all cases, final tweaking in Lightroom using the Adjustment Brushes to fine tune the images (I really like the Brightness Adjustment Brush as a Dodge/Burn tool).
Now, these are far from perfect and undoubtedly a more talented photographer and more talented user of the digital darkroom could come up with much better results; but each of these is much closer to what I envisioned as I looked at different ways to approach the shot and as I picked my final viewpoint to set up from. I wanted the water to be the main feature of each shot and I wanted the little pockets of fall colour to ‘pop’ out from the surrounding evergreens. I also wanted to try to highlight the texture of the Precambrian rock that makes up the Canadian Shield. Was I successful? Well, moreso now than a couple years ago for sure. But the park is on the list for a revisit at some time down the road.
The bottom line is, sometimes it pays to go back and take a look at things we’ve done in the past with a fresh viewpoint and maybe some fresh skills.