my name is mwd: photos

I figured that the foggy nights would be a great time to try get some pictures of houses lit up by their christmas lights, but even more so than with street lights I found it a real struggle to get out of camera what I saw, or at least what I thought I saw.

The digital camera, or perhaps the software I use to process the image, does a great job of removing the fog, which I guess in most cases is what you want. But here I wanted to capture the fog, and so I had to work quite hard to bring it back into the photo with my limited knowledge of Lightroom.

I do wonder if it comes down to the camera’s dynamic range being too good these days for this kind of scene? When in the moment of a scene like this you’re focus is on the christmas lights and their foggy halo, and that feels like all there is, but actually if you look around and let your eyes adjust you can see that the sky is a subtle sodium yellow not deepest black and so forth, All this extra light is now suitably balanced into the photo because for years we’ve been crying for more dynamic range as photographers. The cost is then if we do want to recreate the moments where the human eye is more selective we have to put in the effort to undo all the things we wished for.

One last note: I normally will usea Fujifilm colour or black and white profile with my images, as I prefer them to the more neutral look of the Adobe Color profile. However in this instance I went back to the Adobe Color profile as it gave a softer edge to the halo, whereas the Fuji profiles all tended to have a harsher edge to them.