West Wood, Harbottle

Time for another image from the archive, this time from a location scouting trip back in 2017.

Having previously shared an image from this day—in Location scouting: Northumbrian textures—I’ve sat on this little panoramic shot ever since. The composition never felt quite right and the overall image lacked a ‘wow’ factor.

Four years on it’s clearly still no portfolio shot but, having rediscovered it recently and moving back into my ‘processing’ collection in Lightroom for a few days, it has grown on me.

After a failed attempt at upscaling with Adobe Super Resolution, I occasionally brought the image up in Develop mode and tinkered a little before reverting to where I’d got it years earlier. Then, after passing each source frame in Iridient X-Transformer before re-processing the panorama in Lightroom, I had a vague excuse to start again with the image: rethinking the crop first.

After tightening things from my original slightly-taller crop to the 65:24 ratio beloved of the Hasselblad X-Pan (née Fuji T-X1), I realised overall balance was an issue with the image: the sloping focal plane was sitting across the centre of the image frame, leaving no real visual weight to any one element.

Moving the crop up and therefore losing some of the foreground while gaining more sky, the image balanced much better. After that, spending a bit of time thinking about what I was actually trying to achieve with the image and processing with intent, I found myself in a much happier place with this photograph.