Today’s featured photograph is one of my favourites from our recent vacation. I saw this scene as we waited for our guide on the pier in Sorrento, Italy. The colour tones are a little surprising, leading you to believe that the shot may have been taken much earlier in the morning. It was actually shot at 9:23 am; my position at the time allowed me to capture the exceptional lighting that enabled this picture.
It’s a very simple picture, some Acacia trees on a hilltop, backed by a series of mountains. What I find appealing is the layered series of colour tones, one for each range of hills and the sky. Three shades of blue and a dark foreground. So, how did this come about? I was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time. The sun was high enough in the sky (about 40 deg. above the horizon) and just off to my right (about 30 deg.) to backlight the scene without overpowering it. There was still some mist on the ground in the hills, nicely illuminated by the sunlight coming from the right. The harbour is bordered by cliffs, so the foreground was very much in shadow at this time of the day. The only adjustment I made to this shot was too darken these shadows a little to obscure detail of the cliff face that was becoming visible. The scene called for a silhouette!
There was ample light for the photograph, no tripod required. I was able to get the shot with the aperture set at f11, an ISO setting of 100 and exposure compensation of +.33. The subject was a little distant, so I zoomed in to a focal length of 110 mm.
This picture was a great start to a very good day of touring and some more photographs. Back to those in a later post.