by Barri Elford, WalesrnExif: Nikon D200, 18-200mm, 1/15sec, f/22, ISO 100
Barri says
“I have been interested photography for some time and have owned a number of DSLRs. I primarily focus on landscape photography and this image is of Worm’s Head, in Gower. I’ve been lucky enough to scoop a couple of local competitions and I produce a calendar for my local print shop every year. I primarily shoot in Raw as it allows me to make any necessary adjustments in Photoshop.”
Martin’s Verdict
Here is a beautiful landscape, made all the more powerful because of the dramatic shafts of light shining through the gaps in the clouds. As I have said before, sunset photographs are usually much more interesting when there is some water in the foreground to provide reflections of the evening sky. This image could also do with more sharpening, but I have used a different technique to the more obvious method.
First I duplicated the Background layer and set the layer blend mode to ‘Overlay’. Then, in the Filter menu, I applied the High Pass filter, using a Radius of 2 pixels. The combination of the Overlay blend mode and the High Pass filter can be used to emphasise midtone edge detail. There is a little more to the technique than what I described here, but as you can see, this sharpens up the image and makes the detailed areas in the picture look crisper.