Slingshot

On March 29th, I went to the Ptasi Raj nature reserve on Sobieszewo Island. It was a sunny morning, albeit somewhat chilly. I intended to test a new lens I'd purchased. It was a 70-210 mm zoom lens, so I opted for a spot where a long focal length would be handy. Ultimately, I failed to take many bird photos, and the best pictures of the day were somewhat typical wide-angle woodland shots.

The forked tree was one of them. Admittedly, it's not a work of art by any stretch. Still, I enjoy the composition very much. The tree in the foreground looks alone and abandoned, while all the other trees in the frame are clustered deep in the background, slightly out of focus. It's a simple photo, almost entirely free of distractions, symmetrical and straightforward. I decided to spice it up.

The photo was shot with a Minolta MD 28 mm 1:2.8, wide open at a 1/125th of a second. The camera was a Minolta X-500, and the film was Santacolor 100. I scanned the negative using my usual scanning rig and edited in Darktable 5.0.1.

The first step was to disable the default exposure correction and set the scan's white balance. I used the colour calibration module to sample the film base and adjust the white balance to the selection. I'm aware that negadoctor can do the same. Still, I sometimes prefer to start with a clean slate and hand negadoctor an already balanced image.

Negadoctor was next. I played with the settings to get as close to a neutral-looking image as possible. By "neutral-looking", I mean "as close to the film's colours as possible". I used the output from Filmomat SmartConvert (with disabled colour adjustments) as a reference.

Since my digital camera captures 45 MPix images, grain is always visible on my negative scans. It always contributes some harshness that I prefer to tone down. I'm waiting for software capable of eliminating film grain using AI. Until that happens, the best way to achieve this that I'm aware of is to apply a negative dehaze.

Since haze removal is by default applied before negadoctor in Darktable's image processing pipeline, it tends to darken the images.

At this point, I re-enabled the exposure module and moved it above negadoctor in the pipeline. The default setting of +0.7 EV looked fine, so I left it there.

The photo was slightly crooked, so I straightened it before editing it further. I also applied a crop to remove the borders and place the subject exactly in the centre of the frame.

Colour balance is the tool I use for contrast adjustments. I made the shadows darker while brightening the midtones and highlights.

The colour equaliser tool was next. As of late, I have been applying the same look to my nature photographs: desaturated greens, boosted oranges and reds. Additionally, I darkened the oranges, reds and purples a bit to make the earthy tones punchier in the photo.

The colour correction was subtle. I shifted the colours towards teal for a barely perceptible cooling of the warm tones.

The foreground and the background are sufficiently separated using the DOF. However, I wanted to make the scene more atmospheric. To that end, I used another instance of the haze removal tool to apply a negative dehaze to the masked background. The effect is subtle, but noticeable.

The final step to make the image punchy and powerful was to dodge and burn certain areas of the photo. I brightened the left side of the tree trunk, making it stand out even more.

I also darkened the already dark shaded right side of the tree trunk. Likewise, I made the tree's shadow stronger. Finally, I created a frame using three instances of a linear gradient. The frame concentrates the viewer's focus on the image's centre.

And there it is. Here's what I started and ended up with.

I've shared the photo on Vero and Flickr.