Iceland One-Off - Snaefellsnes Peninsula
There are reasons why a photographer should return to their images again and again. Sometimes allowing time to let things settle, other times to allow for the happy accident of working on other images that then cause you to look at a previously passed over (sometimes even dismissed) image differently. That was the case with the image below. I had an iPhone image taken around the same time, and I realized that there was much in this image that I’d simply forgotten about. So I returned to work on it, and with some minor adjustments, came to appreciate it in a whole new light (pun intended).
You see, in extremely contrasty situations, the worst thing you can do is blow out the highlights - in this case, the brilliantly lit clouds off to the right. However, by exposing so that some texture is retained in the clouds, the remainder of the image looked dark, very dark. What the iPhone image, with its grossly blown-out highlights reminded me, was that there was softer light streaking along the ground and occasionally lighting up parts of the landscape. I knew I’d pulled out the better camera after making the iPhone shot, so I carefully looked into the low values of the images and selected the one that seemed to have the best placed bright light.
As I lifted up the shadows it became clear that not only had the sun cast a bright spot at the base of the mountain to the left, but it also spilled light across the foreground leading to the dramatic edge between the outline of the mountain ridge and the clouds. All I had to do was develop the image to show what the sun was doing and ensuring that it had the dramatic effect it had on me at the time I made the image. Why else would I have grabbed my camera to make it?
I think it’s one of the few images I made that captures the tumultuous relationship between the stark landscape and dynamic weather that is found throughout Iceland. Perhaps the best of the One-Off series.
Make sure you double click on the image to bring it up full screen.