Don’t show me what it looks like. Show me what it feels like. David Alan Harvey (Nat Geo photographer)
Driving slowly along a back-country road in Tuscany, I came across this elderly gentleman making his way up the hill to the village. With the Sun streaming through the early morning fog, I was struck with a sense of how scenes like this had likely played out here in the same way for centuries. I also felt sympathy, perhaps misplaced, for this person alone in the fog. I wanted the image to convey a sense of loneliness and of the timeless way of life in this part of the world.
With this in mind, choosing a moderate wide-angle lens allowed me to compose the image to place the subject back in the frame and ensure the sun through the foreground fog-shrouded trees were also present in the image. The focus point was on the foreground trees, which might seem counter intuitive. But, the image of the man in the background was diffused by the fog, and focusing there would do little to overcome that. In any case, I felt the texture in the foreground trees was an important part of the image — providing some nice textural contrast witht the softness in th erest of the image.
In post, I chose a warm colour balance, added a texture overlay, and added some grain to express what I felt in that moment..
All of the basic editing was done in Lightroom Classic. Basic Panel adjustments were mostly a small bump in contrast, lowering Highlights slider to reign in the highlights a bit and dropping the Blacks slider somewhat to ensure a solid tonal foundation for the image, Most of the apparent warmth of the image comes from the texture overlay added in Photoshop. A texture layer is simply a second image, layered over the primary image with the blendin mode set to “Overlay” (as is the case here) or “Soft Light”.
This is the image used as the Texture Screen added to the image. I felt that it added an “Old-World Europe” feel to the image.
Is it a realistic depiction of the scene in from of my camera… of course not. But it encapsulates more accurately the feel of the moment of the morning in Pienza.
If you are interested in the possibilities in using Texture Screen overlays in your own work, I wrote a simple introductory tutorial, which you can read Here
