tropicalphotography

Christ the Redeemer and overlays

I remember the old days of photography, when we debated whether using an overlay layer in Photoshop was an honest way to portray a landscape. Those were good days, before AI, when we were still exploring the possibilities of relatively primitive digital post-processing. Most of us were oblivious to the fact that post-processing had long preceded digital photography and was widely practiced by analog photographers in the darkroom.

I am back from a short but adventurous vacation in Rio de Janeiro. One of the highlights was hiking and climbing Sugarloaf Mountain in the afternoon. The weather was clearing after several days of rain, but it was warm, which meant considerable evaporation and a fair amount of haze in the atmosphere.

If you have never photographed in the tropics, here’s something to know: you need to work with the haze, not against it.

From a ledge on the rock, I had an open view of Christ the Redeemer overlooking the city and Guanabara Bay. The entire scene was bathed in sunbeams: dramatic shafts of light that seem to fan out through the sky when sunlight breaks through clouds. They are often called crepuscular rays.

The rays aren’t actually separate beams being produced by the atmosphere. They are ordinary sunlight made visible by particles and moisture in the air. Sunlight travels in essentially straight lines, but dust, aerosols, and smoke, scatter some of the light through the water droplets that form the haze. When clouds block most of the sunlight, the gaps between them create bright shafts that stand out against the darker sky.

And what does the overlay layer have to do with all of this?

I created an overlay layer in Photoshop to increase the contrast and make the rays more visible. I then erased some of the overlay from portions of the photo I did not want to emphasize. The effect didn’t create something that wasn’t there. It simply emphasized what the atmosphere was already doing.

Which brings me back to that old question: when does post-processing stop being photography and start becoming something else?

I still don’t have a definitive answer. But after all these years, I’m pretty comfortable using an overlay layer to make a little bit of tropical atmosphere more visible.

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