Experiments in Light

“Portuguese Tower View” : Belem, Lisbon, 7th September 2011

I took this deceptively simple shot from Lisbon’s Torre de Belém, a sixteenth-century fortified tower on the banks of the Tagus river which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and closely associated with the age of discovery.

I say simple, because the picture straight out of the camera was suffering from some horrible distortion caused by using a wide-angle lens. Correcting this is a nightmare, so I usually don’t bother, but here it detracted from the beautiful tones and lines of the image so much that I made the effort. This involves importing the file into dedicated (but tediously slow) software where I was able to make the tower on the left and the column on the right roughly parallel.

Just for comparison, and an insight into the world of post-processing (or ‘faking it‘, as some would have it), here’s what the original picture looked like:

As well as the correction of the lens distortion, you can see that I levelled the horizon and applied a filter to the sky to produce a more pleasing tone (at least to my eyes). I think all of these changes are fairly subtle, but they improve the image enormously.

The wonders of modern technology, eh?

Have a look here for a larger version of the first image.

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