The Making of "Lake Kilstivatnet"

How the winning photo of the "Boats" contest was made

By candid in Photo Contests on Jun 6, 2018

First of all, my sincere thanks to everyone who nominated and voted for my photo in April 2018's "Boats" contest. Now on to how I did take this picture.

This shot was taken on 5 August 2013 in Eidsdal, Norway. The Lake Kilstivatnet (Lake of Kilsti) is an idyllic and easily accessible one, 15 min walk from Kilsti farm on private forest road. The photo was taken during a short pause, when the rain that went all day, briefly stopped.

The tonal contrast between the clouded sky and the rest of the picture seemed to me very high and I took a 5 shots auto bracketing series (0 -2 -4 -6 -8 eV). In the processing with Photoshop I choose a shot with an exposure compensation -4.00 eV from the bracketing series (to protect highlights) and simply enhanced the exposure except of the sky using the wonderful dynamic range of the K-5 sensor.

This photo was handheld with a Pentax K-5 and an smc Pentax-DA 12-24mm F4 ED AL [IF] lens in RAW Format.

• Aperture F8
• Shutter Speed 1/1500s
• ISO 200
• Exposure compensation -4.00 eV
• Exposure Mode Auto Bracketing

The unprocessed image looked like this:

In processing, I used Photoshop with Filter Viveza 2 from the Nik Collection to adjust exposure, contrast, sky structure, etc. After resizing the image to final dimensions, I applied an output sharpening with an PS action based on the "Smart sharpen" filter.

The five image bracketing series was processed with SNS HDR Pro. The final HDR image (not a part of contest) to compare with the contest entry looks like this:

Finally, I am honored to have won my second contest on the pentaxforums.com.

Best regards,

- Alexander (candid)