Deep Forest

One upside of being largely unable to travel outside of my immediate area for the last 6 months is that I have been able to spend some time reviewing and refining my huge backlog of photos, trying in some way to extract a portfolio.  Although even this gets tedious at times, and finding the motivation is not always easy, I have made some progress. Largely pushed by the Lightroom v10 debacle, I have now fully transitioned (back) to Capture One and I’m finding it very rewarding. There are some workflow drawbacks, but the degree of control in Capture One is vastly superior to that in Lightroom. This does mean that I have to process my Hasselblad raws in Phocus, but that’s not too much of an issue.

I’m also doing a lot of printing, concentrating on some specific photos.  The one presented here has been at the back of my mind for some time. As far as I’m concerned this is a 5 star photo. It shows the forest wall rising above a waterfall a little about the source of the Levada do Rei in Madeira.

The scale is perhaps not easy to understanding from this photo. It was taken from quite a high perspective, at 30mm equivalent focal length. Everything in the picture is bigger than it looks. It is easier to understand on a print, and I’ve printed this at A2 size.  I believe it is due to a slight lack of depth perception which comes from the micro Four Thirds sensor.  It was actually from my two trips to Madeira in 2019 that I started to find I was hitting the limits of m43, not only from this depth perception issue, but also in terms of far distance definition, and of dynamic range. This led me eventually to the Hasselblad X system as a complementary system.

Still, I enjoy this photo very much, and the Olympus E-M1MkII and 12-100 lens enabled me to take it. The Levada do Rei is quite an easy hike, but others are less so (the terrifying - but beautiful -  Levada do Norte for example), and I’m not sure even now if I’d take the Hasselblad system on such a trek.