This is the classic view of Riomaggiore from the beginning of the path
to the next town, the “Via del Amore”. Of course at noon on a sunny day,
it doesn’t really look like this. The sky should be blown out and the
colors should be without contrast.
Capturing pictures during travel is always a problem. While you can
always get up early and shoot in the morning light and then sleep until
dinner time for the evening light, do you really want to keep the camera
put away when out looking at the sights?
To capture the midday images, I stacked a polarizing filter and a
warming filter on the D80. While you’ll read all about warming filters
in articles and books from the film era, many believe that they have
lost their utility for digital since white balance can be controlled so
easily after the fact in camera or in post-processing. I think that what
they’re ignoring is that we need every chance to match the dynamic range
of the scene to the desired image so that it can be captured within the
sensitivity range of the digital sensor. On a bright day, the
combination of the polarizer to kill reflections and the warming filter
to let the weaker red-oranges come through really helps the contrast in
the scene.
Interestingly, the camera, if it relies on a through the lens light
balance like the D80 will adjust the image back if set to auto white
balance, pushing the image to the blue and removing the warming effect.
It needs to be added back judiciously to get the right look.
