Mike Stacey

MISTY MOUNTAIN HOP - MADEIRA [SET 1 of 2]

Added 2023-09-17 07:07:12 +0000 UTC

You know the song right?

This spot was way up in the mountains of Madeira. We drove around the northern coastline from our BNB near Sao Vicente and then uphill for ages into the mountains and the end of the road. Then it's a short hike to this place where we shot some photos, although the trail itself keeps going to an amazing waterfall but we'd started walking too late as usual 🤣

It was magic just to sit here for a while and take in the mossy smells and quiet of the forest. I'm well familiar with similar places near where I used to live in the Blue Mountains in Australia. The light is always beautiful but you have to be careful because even though it seems soft, it's quite directional and can be very unflattering if the model isn't facing the right direction.

Shot with the Z6 and an ancient manual focus 35mm f2.8.

Editing:

RAW into Camera RAW for profile correction and TIF conversion. TIF into Silver Efex Pro for B&W adjustments.

You can see the control points I used to bring out the structure of the background. Other adjustments were pretty standard as the TIF was already looking good enough. I did some frequency separation on the skin in some shots as shadows were a bit ugly sometimes due to the difficult light. I could have gone much further with the skin work but preferred to leave it more natural looking. I also added a very slight amount of silver paper toning to make the highlight tones really glow.

DON'T FORGET I HAVE A COMPLETE FREQURENCY SEPARATION KIT AVAILABLE IN MY STORE HERE.