Inevitably you are asked; How did you take that photo? Whether you are a pro-photographer or an enthusiast people will always be fascinated by what they see as an amazing photograph.

Thankfully we are not magicians. We don’t have to hide our techniques behind a code of honour and revealing our techniques will not get us banned from the brotherhood of photographers. More importantly even the greatest photograph is not magic.

So we here at ilikecameras are going to show you what goes into a photograph. Every now and then we will pick a photograph and find out how it was taken, what was done to it and all the other variables that made it what it is. This will range from time, place and date to camera gear and settings used through to darkroom (digital or physical) techniques. Aperture, shutter, ISO, lens, camera body, Photoshop layers and more.

If you see a photograph you want to know more about then email it to one of us and we will do our best. Please include as much info about the photographer as you can so that we can easily get in touch with them. Naturally not all photographers are keen to reveal their secrets so don’t be disappointed if we can’t tell you how a masterpiece was made. Also try not to send in photographs by Ansel Adams or Henri Cartier-Bresson as they are not likely going to respond to our emails.

To get the ball rolling I am going to use one of my photographs to which Orange Bread asked Do you think you can show us the original shot?

Now clearly this photograph is altered. Nobody should expect anything other than a sunset on Titan to look like this. If you have seen with your own eyes a sunset like this then I suggest you either stop taking those pills or you go to your nearest doctor and start taking some pills. I will also say that no photographer will get this result straight out of their camera, it is too contrasty to be anything other than the work of darkroom techniques. Lets start with the “taking” part of the photograph.

The taking

A Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L lens mounted to a Canon EOS 10D was used. This is a handheld shot, no tripod as I was strolling along the beach with my girlfriend at the time. No filters were used except for the standard UV filter to keep the lens safe from salt-spray. The Flickr displayed EXIF data says it was taken somewhere around midnight which is obviously not right. Looking at my original files the EXIF says just before seven in the evening. I metered off of the clouds just to the right of the sun to get an even balance of the dimmer sky and water against the bright setting sun.

On that I just want to say even though you are told to meter on highlights to avoid blowout you still have to apply your brain to that advice. If the sun is in your viewfinder then don’t meter off of it unless you actually want just a photo of the sun (which won’t damage your digital camera by the way.) For sunsets I usually meter off clouds or sky near to but not right next to the sun. It is OK for the sun in your sunset photos to be blown-out.

The exposure

The exposure was a shutter speed of 1/250th, an aperture value of f/8 and an ISO of 100. The Canon 10D was in Aperture Priority mode which means that you set the aperture and it figures out the best shutter speed for you. I would say that 80% of my photographs are shot in AV mode and that a lot of pro-photographers use AV mode too. It allows for creativity while still being fast enough to use in most situations. Had this been a serious photo taking excursion I would have used a tripod and bracketed the scene by a stop on either side.

In this situation I have to admit that aperture choice was not that carefully thought out. DOF, which is largely controlled by your aperture choice, was not too important to the photograph. I did not want the foreground surf to be sharp because I find it can distract in sunset shots when too sharp. So I auto-focused off of the headland and left the horizon which is at “infinity”. The camera then chose the 1/250th shutter speed.

The composition

I composed the photograph to include the ripples in the water at the bottom and the layers of cloud in the sky up top. I left some space to the right of the silhouetted headland to keep the sky and water connected. Off to the left of this shot were homes which I did not want included in the shot.

So with all that in mind I took the photograph and moved on. Now we move from the photo taking step to the photo processing step which is where the digital darkroom comes into play.

The processing

My Canon 10D is almost always in RAW mode. This means that what comes out of my camera when I get home is a CRW file and not a JPEG file which most digicams will produce. This introduces an extra step in to the editing chain called RAW processing.

I use the Camera Raw plugin that comes with Photoshop CS 2 as it produces quality while not requiring hours of fiddling to produce the simplest of edits. For this photograph, and almost every photograph I take through Camera RAW, I upped the contrast slider to 60% and dialled in +0.20 on the exposure slider. White balance was left as it is and the others were left on automatic. I also left it in 8bit mode as frankly it is not that great a photo that I would want to eek every last bit out of the available data using 16bit mode.

This left me with the image you see to the left.

I wanted a dramatic sunset and this was not one of those, not yet. The first adjustment layer I applied was the Channel Mixer. I have a lot of fun with the Channel Mixer as you can get some dramatic results by literally mixing the channels. For converting to B&W it is also ideal. I set Red to 50% and Green to 50% leaving Blue on 0%. Generally I make sure the three values add up to 100%. I then ticked the Monochrome checkbox. Now this turns your photo B&W but only if you leave the blending mode of the layer on Normal. I changed the layer’s blending mode to Color Burn. This setting is almost always dramatic so use it carefully.

At this point I noticed the foreground water had been so affected by the Color Burn layer that it was hardly showing. So using the airbrush tool, set to black, I “painted out” an area corresponding to the water in the layer’s mask. This is a handy trick to learn in Photoshop. When applying any adjustment layer you will get a layer mask which is filled in with white. You can then “paint out” sections of it. This tells Photoshop which areas of the photo to apply the adjustment layer to, white areas, and which areas to leave unaffected, black areas. You can use colours inbetween white and black to do graduated application too.

At this point the image was dramatic but I was not liking the colours all that much. Roll in the Color Balance adjustment layer.

This tool lets you play with the overall colours of your photograph to quite an extreme degree. As ever, be careful or you could make your husband’s skin a sickly shade of green. In this photograph I pushed it towards Red in the first slider, towards Magenta in the second and towards Blue in the third. The result as you can see is quite vivid.

The fourth and final step was a new layer which had some black airbrushed into it and then the blending mode set to Soft Light. After step 3 I thought the foreground water was too bright and drew attention away from the sky. I could have used the Burn tool to darken that area but I decided to use another layer instead. Like the trick in step 1 with the layer mask you can also create normal layers and then using the airbrush paint in tints, lighten and darken areas and do pretty much anything you may want. The Soft Light blending mode made sure that the black did not appear as a black blob but rather as a gentle dimming in the painted area.

And there you have it. A dramatic if rather processed sunset shot.