There’s this idea in digital photography that your gear or your software must be at the heart of everything you do. That’s not true. The art of photography lies not in the tools you use, but knowing what to do with them.
So with this image of the Grand Pier at Weston-super-Mare, I wanted to explain a few things. First, you don’t need a new camera. This was taken on a 24MP Nikon D610 from 2013. I could have taken exactly the same image on my 2023 24MP Canon EOS R8 and you would not have been able to tell them apart. The lens I used was a second-hand Nikkor AF-S 16-35mm f/4G ED VR that cost UK£350. The results are at least as good as those from my new Canon RF 15-30mm F4.5-6.3 IS STM (a great lens, and I can’t justify the cost of one of Canon’s constant-aperture super-wide zooms).
So the point of this shot was knowing where to stand, what to have in the foreground, how to wait for the light and understanding what I could do later when editing it. The camera gear had nothing to do with it. I worked out the shot, not the camera.
My second point is that although I used Capture One for the editing, I could have done exactly the same things in Lightroom Classic, Photoshop or any other photo-editor. Again, the software isn’t what makes this possible – it’s knowing what to do in order to achieve the effect you want.
You might edit this shot differently – this is how I worked it out.
Step 01: Auto adjustments
I tend to do this both in Capture One and Lightroom, just to even up the shadow and highlight detail to see how that looks, and to recover any lost highlight detail in RAW files. Here, Capture One has reduced the Exposure a little, it has brought down/recovered the Highlights and it has also reduced the Shadows to make them a bit richer. Overall, it’s an improvement and quick to do. Lightroom’s auto adjustments will do the same things, though Lightroom will also increase the Saturation and especially the Vibrance, which I don’t like.
Step 02: White balance shift
I tend to shoot RAW files with the white balance set to auto and leave the camera to sort it out. Mostly, it’s fine, but I felt this scene looked a little cold for the effect I was after, so I’ve shifted Capture One’s Temperature slider a little way to the right to warm things up. This shifts it away from the ‘As Shot’ setting to a ‘Custom’ setting.
Step 03: Sky darkening
For this shot to work it needs a darker and more dramatic sky. All I use for this is a regular Linear Gradient Mask in Capture One – I would do exactly the same in Lightroom. For this, I’ve reduced the Exposure value a little and then used the Curve tool to darken the sky and add contrast at the same time. Lightroom does of course have an AI sky masking tool but I don’t use this unless I have to because it doesn’t apply a natural-looking gradation to the sky. If I do use this Lightroom sky mask tool, I will intersect it with a linear mask to blend it in more subtly.
Step 04: Add a vignette
Adding a subtle vignette to an image can often add a little tonal contrast and depth as well as providing a subtle kind of framing effect. Vignettes are added with a simple slider in Capture One. You don’t get the same control that Lightroom’s Vignette options provide, but it’s fine for this image.
So here’s the finished image, with the start shot shown as a thumbnail in the top left. I think it’s a pretty effective transformation and a much closer to how the scene felt at the time than the camera’s own rather clinical rendering.
