Digital Travel Photography in Poland

The challenge of digital travel photography is in determining how much of a story to
capture in one picture

A tower at one end of Malbork Castle provided me with a great view of the castle layout, as well as the surrounding countryside.

While I had many well-composed and well-exposed images of the castle at close quarters, those only tell the story of castle architecture. For my friends who would never visit this site, I wanted to show how the castle was situated in its local environment.

But, by trying to capture the more complete story, I introduced an exposure conundrum.

I was able to capture an interesting composition with a strong foreground to anchor the wide angle view. But, in trying to cover such a wide expanse, I encountered three different ranges of light levels, ranging from shadows in the foreground, to the mid tones in the river and distant farmland, to the bright sky. Inevitably, part of the image would suffer, and you can see that when I processed the image I opted for deeper shadows in the castle courtyard and the forest at top right.

Here's Where I Started...

The original image, at right, is a bit washed out and features too much sky with little drama. The foreground at bottom left also has a bit of scaffold topped by a blue tarp. I've opted to crop out both the tarp and some of the sky to bring the focus to the castle and river.

If you compare this to the final image at top, you will see that I used three operations to clean up the image:

1. The crop. I used golden rectangle proportions, and that helped remove the sky and tarp.
   
   
2. A slight image rotate to get the horizon level. Note that the horizon has a slight curve. You might be tempted to think that is due to the curvature of the earth, but it is really due to the wide-angle focal length and the angle of the camera pointing downward.
   
   
3. Levels and contrast adjustment to compensate for over exposure, improve the shadows, and bring out the roof color