Highlands Stillness

Joe and I spent our final morning on the Isle of Skye photographing Mealt Falls at sunrise, enjoying a delicious Scottish “MacDonald’s” breakfast, and touring the Torabhaig Distillery. All excellent choices, but the tradeoff was that we knew we would not make it back to Glen Coe in time to take any pictures because of the short December days. We passed through the valley of Glen Coe as the sun was setting and arrived at the viewpoint above Loch Tulla just after sunset, so we stopped for a few minutes to take in the gorgeous Highlands landscape at twilight.

The evening was perfectly calm and clear, crisp but not cold, and the half moon was rising over snow-covered mountains to the east. We captured a few images, not expecting to get anything particularly special, but I was taken by this photo when I saw it on my computer screen and immediately knew I wanted to convert it to black and white. (Note, as explained below, this image is a composite of two separate exposures necessary to capture detail in both the dark foreground and bright moon.)

I typically edit my black and white landscape photos using the Artisan Pro panel in Photoshop because of the precision and control offered by that workflow; this photo, however, is a rare example of an image that Lightroom provided a better means to achieve my vision for the photo that what I could achieve using the Artisan Pro panel. Try as I might, I was unable to isolate and emphasize the wispy clouds using luminosity masks, but a simple radial gradient and Whites adjustment in Lightroom made them stand out beautifully.

I also found a perfect black and white profile in Lightroom (Jim Welninski’s Kodak High Speed Infrared 2) that achieved the kind of darkness in the sky and foreground contrast that I envisioned, so very little editing was needed after the profile was applied. Except…

The lower part of the sky was too bright behind the mountains. I attempted to use a sky mask in Lightroom, but the selection was not strong enough to isolate the sky from the mountains resulting in faint, broad halos above the mountains-telltale signs of obvious editing. I still needed to work in Photoshop to completely isolate the sky from the foreground, but I wanted to continue editing directly on the raw image. The solution was to open the preliminary edited image in Photoshop as a smart object which could be duplicated to allow for separate adjustments in Camera Raw for the foreground and sky, then a hard mask could be used to overlay the sky layer on the foreground. It sounds simple enough, but I struggled a bit with this workflow.

Because this image was captured after sunset, the moon was much brighter than the landscape and appears in the original image as a bright white smudge. I captured a separate image at 80 mm properly exposed for the moon and added it to this image on a separate layer. The moon is enlarged slightly to more closely match what my eyes saw.

Thinking I was finished with the edit, it was time to print the image. I foolishly decided that my editing and softproofing skills were so good that I could print directly to a 13”x19” sheet of Moab Juniper Baryta paper rather than creating a letter-size test print first on standard luster paper. This mistake cost me a sheet of Juniper; I could immediately see in the print that the foreground was all muddied and the snow on the mountains was lacking some brightness. After some fine-tuning of the layers in Photoshop, I created a test print that looked much better.

Over the last few months, I’ve been rediscovering how to create expressive, or fine art, photography. It has been a slow process that has required not only re-learning of technical skills needed to process a photo in a particular style, but more importantly, it has also required me to rediscover what it is I want to express through my images. And through this process, I’m finally beginning to understand how to communicate something more than simply the natural beauty of a landscape through a photograph.

In looking at the first print of this image, I realized that the photo fell short of the mark. It was a beautiful photograph, but it lacked the subtle intensity that is necessary to convey the experience and emotion that I intended. This is the value of a print; it helps us to truly see a photograph. For me, the final image perfectly captures the Stillness of the moment.