This is a digital photograph, taken on a relatively modest Sony A6000 crop format camera with a 55mm-210mm mid-range zoom (equivalent to 83mm-315mm full frame). It was the middle of a grey October day at Erith on the River Thames at the eastern edge of London. The camera settings were iso100 1/1,000 sec f/8 113mm (=170mm full frame). I managed to keep the camera level and framed the view to my satisfaction, perspective (keystone) distortion could be ignored because of the distance.
The image is cropped slightly in height to fit my preferred landscape format of Golden Section which is fractionally shallower than the native 2:3 format of the camera. The picture was shot in RAW and edited exclusively in Capture One 21 Pro which basically does pretty well every thing that Lightroom does, a chunk of what Photoshop does and some things that neither of them do.
When shooting digitally I almost always underexpose by several stops to avoid blowing out the highlights (when shooting analogue film I do the opposite). With Sony I know that I can recover lots of detail from the shadows and this gives me the maximum dynamic range to work with. Straight out of the camera this appears to give a very flat and over dark image.
However, in the RAW image file all the information is there and once the basic settings are adjusted it gives a nice clean image which is fairly close to what a human eye would have observed. Strictly speaking this is probably the closest possible to a documentary view of this scene at this precise point in time. Different times of day or year, different states of the tide and different weather would obviously all give very different pictures.
However, by using a lumar mask to separate adjustments for the sky and river from the subject and the reflections it is possible to achieve a more subtle and balanced result. This is starting to deviate from human vision and is not, strictly speaking documentary:
The edit above was used to produce the black and white image below. To give an “authentic” looking analogue appearance I simulate a silver rich grain and increase both the contrast and brightness of the picture. This is, when you think about it, very far from how the human eye would see this scene. Curiously being black and white makes the photograph feel more authentic and at the same time more romantic, for what is after, all a completely industrial landscape:
The final edit is my take on a digital duo-tone. Various duo-tone processes have a long history and the term just means making an image use a restricted pallet of just two tones. My process is slightly different from others that I have seen although I would not claim that it is unique – very little is truly original. My duo-tones are made of one colour and shades of grey. In this case the subject and it’s reflections are grey and the background (the river and the sky) are blue. This is done purely by manipulating the colour pallet and tonal range in the original photo.
The duo-tone with it’s contrasting mixture of vibrant colour with black and white obviously gives a very distinctive and striking image. This is evidently totally different from the way that any living eye would see this view. Nevertheless, everything you see was in the original picture, all that has been done is to remove most colour and, extremely emphasise a single remaining colour.
These 4 edits are just a tiny selection of what it is possible to make from a single photograph taken in 1/1,000 of a second.