Salen Boneyard

Yesterday I took this image of these sad old fishing boats on the outskirts of Salen on the Isle of Mull. I have often passed them and wanted to photograph them, but the light has never been nice or I haven’t had the time. The light yesterday was OK, but not wonderful, and I had the time. Oddly I left my SLR in the car and took the little LX3 with me and tried a few compositions in RAW format. For those of you interested in the “Panny’s” performance, I spent 5 minutes in Lightroom using the graduated filter to lighten the foreground and darken the skies as well as pushing the colour saturation of the foreground greens and the blue in the skies. All in all I tweaked the exposure to a ridiculous extent and I’m happy to report that the LX3 raw files have a lot of latitude. I’m very impressed and I certainly think a landscape photographer wanting to travel light could take the LX3 and a portable tripod like a Gorillapod or similar, and produce great results. The original picture was at ISO 80, so in summary, keep the ISO low and you’ll have immense latitude in post processing.

I have to retract what I said in my first impressions posting about the RAW files not being worth the bother for most people; frankly they are worth the bother, they are an excellent way to control your image making.