When out in the field taking your photos, if things are moving fast, you’ll want to give yourself options. Here are some of the options I decided to give myself on the day. You can see that I tried several positions of the iceberg, some where it was at the top, others at the middle or bottom, of the frame. I also tried framing wider and narrower (zoom in or out).
(This is a gallery, use the left/right arrows to scroll)
I was on a boat when taking these images, so you have to think and move fast. It is very different from other landscape photography where you sit and dial everything in perfectly, with the camera locked down on a tripod. It is fun to do things differently.
In the end, this is the image that was selected as my favorite.
But this is just the RAW image and selecting the image to work with is just the start of the process of making a final image. By the nature of modern photography, the RAW file is a flat, low contrast image. If you shoot to JPEG, the camera will make decisions about contrast, what is light and dark, color balance, etc., and bake that into the result. If use RAW, you can make those decisions after shooting, which is what modern photographers will do.
So what is next?
Next we bring the image into LightRoom and begin our edits.
The first set of edits balance the highlights and shadows. After that, we add in some Vibrance to bring the blues back to the colors that match reality (the iceberg blue is truly something to behold).
We have a start to the image, but there are things that are still distracting and missing.
For this image, I did something a little unusual. I have a mask that includes everything except the iceberg, and I desaturated by a lot. This gives a strong contrast between the iceberg and the rest of the image — the iceberg is this strong, almost unreal, blue, while the rest of the image is almost black and white. I followed this up with a vignette to darken the edges and hold the eye on the iceberg.
By desaturating everything that isn’t the iceberg, we create both the contrast and remove the yellow cast from the foreground. It is a subtle change but it helps keep the eye where I want it. The vignette is also kept subtle, but if you didn’t know it was there, you might never know it was there.
And this is how I took this image from shot to edits to final. This image has a very nice 12x18in and it looks fantastic.
-B