Photo Series - Vilarinho San Ramao

Our trip was a group trip about spending time together and hiking the Douro River Valley in Portugal. Late one afternoon though, I did a break-out session while staying at Vilarinho Sao Ramao.  The cool thing is everyone else was doing something, or nothing, to get ready for dinner.  While taking some vineyard shots along comes this rainbow.  Dark clouds, rainbow, breaks with the sun spotting the distant landscape; nature does its own thing.

Photography has many fitting definitions, but like painting and drawing one that's always in the discussion is a study of light.  The word is Greek-based derived from “photos” meaning light and graphe meaning lines.  Yet, shooting photographs is a mix of technical and artistic skills.  The technical is controlling the light using aperture, shutter speed and film or camera speed.  In addition to the art of using light, subject and composition, photography is about timing and capturing the moment. With most other art types the artist can recreate an image from memory.

Post processing in Photography is another technical layer and as much of a tool as a chisel to a sculptor. In our examples, the lighter image has some fairly standard post processing with opening up the shadow, minor color correcting and texture effects. Our darker image has quite a bit more work and time invested where the contrast between the shadows and clouds is emphasized and the color highlights and mid-tones are brightened. The dark to light relationship and the color contrast creates that “pop” everyone looks for in a color photo.

Try clicking the shots to enlarge them for a better look. The dark clouds version is my favorite.