Neist Point

In November 2014 I went on just my second trip photographing with Medium Format gear.  At the time, The Mamiya/Phase One 645 DF+ was the camera and the older, pre blue-ring lens era, lenses were at hand.  An early drive to the western-most point on Scotland's Isle of Skye at Neist Point was the plan and it was an unusually beautiful morning with a warm yellow-orange sunrise.  I climbed to high ground to get a grand overview of the area and noticed there was a lot of humidity haze in the air.  The sun coming up at a 45 degree backlit angle from the left complicated matters for getting a nice shot of the cliff with the lighthouse but even if we had come to this location in the afternoon, this far north in November, even at sunset, the light would still be quartering front-light with dappled light on the cliffs.  So I made the best exposure I could realizing that to get to something that would resemble what my eye saw would take just a bit of processing when I got home.  When I started to work on this photo, I was disappointed that I just couldn't  get the look that I wanted.  Neither the colors that my eyes saw or the details in the cliff that my eyes saw were well represented.  After several attempts and a couple of years using the tools in Adobe Camera Raw, Nik and Photoshop I came up with another version.  It was closer to what I saw but still not quite right.  I proceded to forget about it until I started playing around with Topaz Studio, a stand-alone image processing suite that can also be run as a plug-in inside Photoshop.  As I was using Topaz to handle other difficult images and became more proficient, the thought of this photo re-entered my mind.  I made several attempts at it but just couldn't quite get to where I wanted to go with the photo to illustrate what I experienced that glorious morning.

Finally I got the idea from an Infrared photography course that I took which taught to completely separate the photograph into multiple different photographs to get each component to look the way you want and then to assemble these components and apply any finishing touches.  I then processed the same RAW file three times; first to get the sky looking correct, then to get the water just right and finally to illustrate the rock and lighthouse properly.  I then put the three photographs together as layers in a single document, and carefully masked each layer to expose just the parts that each layer was RAW converted for - basically reassembling the layered image.  Now I was ready for the tools in Topaz Studio and after just a few tweaks to contrast and additional dehaze I finally arrived at an image that rekindles the love I had for the location - it only took three years to get there.  The moral of the story, don't give up when you can't get the look that you remembered or are trying to reproduce, sometimes it may take some new tools or newly gained skills to get there but going back to photographs that disappointed you after visiting a location that excited you can yield some results that put a smile on your face.  Here is the final photograph that finally fulfilled the promise of the morning spent here.