The Beautiful Riomaggiore, Cinque Terre
I love when human architecture blends with nature in a unique and beautiful way. It’s hard to find a place that can illustrate it better than the town of Riomaggiore, Cinque Terre.
Shortly before I shot this, a fisherman pulled through the inlet and docked his boat. He hopped up onto the rocks with a bucket and pulled out a large octopus. Clearly pissed off, the octopus writhed and wrapped his tentacles around his arm. With his free hand, the fisherman pulled the octopus off his arm and by the tentacles, he repeatedly slammed him onto the rocks. Wham, wham, thwack, and…. Problem solved.
Technical Mumbo Jumbo
First of all, this photo is not an HDR image or a blend of multiple exposures. Instead, it’s processed from a single D700 RAW file. I wanted to mention this today because a lot of people have been mistaking colorful images for HDRs lately. When did that happen? Anyway, before I go on a rant, I’ll break down the image.
After correcting the Chromatic Aberration in Lightroom, I exported a 16bit Tiff file and opened it in Photoshop. From there I added some selective sharpening to the foreground elements using NIK Sharpener Pro and made all of the contrast and color adjustments using simple luminance masking and adjustment layers. I also cast a level 16 wizard spell on the green channel to give it some more pop and tonal contrast. Some of the lens distortion was also manually adjusted without the aid of magic spells.
