The Making of Half of Day 18
Jens and I once took a looooong trip to the Black Forest and Switzerland, but the weather was bitterly cold (and I’m a big wuss when it comes to cold). So I took most of my photos from inside the car – I even came up with a jingle for it: “Germany through the windshield! Germany through the windshield!” (It sounds a lot catchier in real life)
The upshot is that I like taking photos through the windshield now. There’s a good bit of luck involved, but otherwise all the same precepts of non-windshield photography apply: the lighting should be good, the horizons should be straight, there should be some subject involved.
We went to Bielefeld last weekend, famous in Germany for not being famous, and I had a chance to work out my through-the-windshield shots. There were actually a few I liked, but I settled on one in particular for my daily shot. Before I processed it, it looked like this:
This actually captures the weather and the mood perfectly: drizzly, grey, and with just a hint of worse to come. There’s actually very little done to this, although there seems to be one key step: increasing exposure, increasing the “blacks,” and lowering the contrast.
At first, I looked at the settings and wondered why I hadn’t just increased the contrast, since that seems to be what I did in a roundabout way above. But then once I actually tried just increasing the contrast, I saw that the tones in the middle part – where the road vanishes – lose their misty, ethereal aspect:
So by doing something that doesn’t seem intuitive at all, that misty feeling of the original is preserved.
Next was just a small curves adjustment:
And then the entire photo was desaturated:
The bit that makes this photo memorable, I think, is in the split toning. An oatmeal highlight was added with a very slight brown shadow tint to give us the final photo:
