A slice of Cheddar
Gorges may form one of the natural world’s most spectacular landscapes, but they’re a pain in the proverbial to photograph, as David Noton discovers…
I’ve shot a few Gorges in my time, from Western Australia to Argentina to the Grand Canyon to Cheddar, and encountered the same problem at all.
Yes, I know that the Grand Canyon is 15 times deeper than Cheddar Gorge, but stand on the rim of either when the sun is low in the sky at the beginning or end of day and, while golden light bathes the landscape all around, the depths of the gorge below is plunged into dark shadow. By the time those deep regions receive any direct light the sun will be high in the sky delivering harsh, contrasty and unappealing illumination. While gorges may be the most incredibly dramatic landscapes to behold, they are damned tricky to shoot.
Spring in the Mendips, and the sun is dipping down over the Bristol Channel to the southwest. I’m stood on the lip of Cheddar Gorge beside the tripod and perilously close to the edge. One wrong step and I’m history, but images with impact are never made from the car park. High altitude cloud is masking the sun allowing just a glimmer through onto Somerset below. Normally that would cause me angst; insipid light is rarely an ingredient for landscape photography success, but this evening I’m glad of it. Where gorges are concerned, contrast is the problem, so this soft light is just what I need.
Vertically below the road winds through the gorge. With my 14mm prime lens fitted on my full-frame 1Ds Mark III I have a super-wide angle of view enabling a composition incorporating the depths of the gorge, the Somerset Levels and a good slice of backlit sky. This lens has proved very useful over the years; it’s rectilinearly corrected, which means the extreme barrel distortion normally associated with fisheye-type optics is absent. It’s also small and light, meaning it can quite happily live in my camera bag without breaking my back, and, at f/2.8, it’s relatively fast, making it a handy lens for shooting night skies. But there’s one major drawback common to many super-wides; the bulbous front element makes using a filter virtually impossible.
This shot, looking straight into the light, would normally be a job for a grad; probably a 0.9 (3-stop) neutral density hard graduated filter to hold back the exposure on the sky, allowing me to expose for the gorge, but as that’s out of the question I have to resort to exposure merging; making two captures, one exposed for the bright sky and one for the dark gorge, to be blended later in post-production. No problem; I do it all the time. Selecting the sky image, dropping it as a layer over the landscape image, then selecting the sky with the lasso tool, feathering the selection and applying a layer mask to reveal only the under-exposed sky over the lighter landscape layer beneath is a lot easier than it sounds, and actually quicker to do than it is to explain.
Wizardry in the dark arts of Photoshop will never make a bad picture good, but, as this gorge shoot illustrates, exposure-merging is a technique that does have its uses. I do prefer to keep things simple, to do it all in-camera, to capture the moment in one frame the way we had to back in the film era. But ultimately, it’s the picture alone that matters. The key question is always: does it look real? Exposure merging can result in gruesome, unbelievable travesties, but when done subtly it’s a useful technique to have in reserve.
One wrong step and I’m history, but images with impact are never made from the car park