The Photo

This isn’t the kind of image I’d normally submit to DA, so I guess that’s why I’m submitting it.
I shoot quite a lot, and only a small percentage of my works ends up in my DA gallery.
When it comes to choosing which image to submit, I’ve realized that there are images that I consider “DA style images” which will fit into my gallery here.
Other images go onto my own website, and get exhibited, but never get submitted here, so I thought I’d give one of them a chance here.

I chose this image for a couple of reasons:
It’s taken in a part of southern Portugal where my wife and I are planning to move to, and this shot was taken from around 100 meters up the hill from where the house is. The project we’re working on there is everything I’ve ever wanted to do with my life, and being able to live in such a beautiful area is a dream I’ve had for a long time.

Every time we go there, I try to get a shot from this hill, and this was taken back in March, just before the sunset.
It’s a location I’ve got the rest of my life to get right, both sunrise and sunset, so consider this a work in progress.

The other reason is that recently this particular image has sold quite a few prints locally, so I wondered how it would get on here.

To be honest, I really don’t expect this to be a popular DA image, it looks far better as a print than it does on the web.

I’ve got a number of panoramic format landscapes which I may submit sometime in the future, so this may be the first in a loose series of 3:1 ratio shots.

Technique

This is only a tiny portion of the view from the side of the road, which runs around the side of the hills facing south.
I was playing around with the telephoto lens trying to isolate patterns of the light and shade of the hills, and compressing perspective with the telephoto.

It’s quite windy up there, so I didn’t attempt to do this handheld, and besides, I prefer working with a tripod, I actually find it easier to compose as a tripod slows me down.

I isolated parts of the scene through the viewfinder, and as the sky was brighter, filtered the sky with a 2 stop ND graduate filter with a soft graduation placed along the distant hills.

I really love panoramic format images (not stitched panoramas, I’m a little too lazy to do that) with a ratio of 2:1 or 3:1 and often shoot landscapes with the intention of cropping the top and bottom off like this. The eye moves through an image like this in a different way, so not everything works as a “letterbox” composition, but I thought this scene was suited to it.
So I framed this with the part I was interested in right across the middle, which gave me more latitude to crop from both top and bottom, and also meant that I’d be removing the corner from the image, which on my lens are usually quite soft.

As I said, I used a tripod to keep the camera steady, and a cable release to trip the shutter without nudging the camera. It’s a low contrast scene so I relied on the camera’s matrix meter for the reading, dialing in -.5 of a stop compensation as I thought that slightly underexposing would give me more contrast between the shadow parts of the hill and the lit parts.
I set the white balance at 6500K manually to enhance the orange glow from the dusk.

Post Processing

This is prettymuch as it came out of the camera apart from the cropping. I enhanced mid-tone contrast a little, tweaked vibrancy and that’s it.
The original RAW file was sharpened, and then after the image had been resized, it was sharpened again for the web, using the Lightness channel in Lab Colour mode.

Metadata

Taken near Marmelete, Monchique, Algarve, Portugal
Nikon D80 | Nikkor 18-200VR | Nikon cable release
Manfrotto 190XProB w/ 322RC2 ballhead
Lee 0.9 (2 stop) soft GND
1/15s | f8 | 52mm

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