I am making progress on getting my pictures from last week’s pilgrimage published but it is slow going. The problem is that I have become addicted to tweaking the images in my digital darkroom. Very occasionally, I will find that one of my photos works just as it is; most of the time, a little extra polishing makes a world of difference between just another snapshot and a picture that I’m happy to share in my public portfolio.

The image shown (which links to my growing Camino de Santiago 2006 set) is one of those that I’ve taken a step further. Rather than just trying to improve the composition by judicious cropping and adjusting the levels and colour balance to enhance the lighting, I’ve layered two shots of the same tree. One was taken with flash (also shown in the series) and the other without; the latter was extremely overexposed but rotated into almost the same position (although I moved a little between shots) and turned into a translucent overlay.

If you compare the original and the altered versions, I suspect you will agree that the latter is the stronger image. Working in the digital darkroom is worthwhile and satisfying. However, it is also time-consuming; watch for a trickle rather than a flood of additional images over the next week.

Technorati Tags:

digital darkroom

flickr

image manipulation

camino de santiago