Poppies

This picture illustrates the difference which the move to digital has made to my photography.

I like to think I have a reasonably decent instinctive feel for composition, and what constitutes a successful image. What I didn't have, at least until I 'went digital', was any real technical capability. With my old Minolta, I focused manually, set the shutter speed at 1/125, adjusted the aperture ring until the light meter told me to stop, and pressed the shutter release. I had a vague notion that high shutter speeds correlated to shallow depth of field, but that's about the extent of it. The cost of film and development meant that I couldn't really justify more than two attempts at a shot, and of course I'd have to wait several weeks usually before seeing the results, meaning that experimenting to improve my technique by trial and error was out of the question.

Here you can see the result. This scene had the potential to be one of the best photos I'd ever taken. The vivid colour of the poppies in the foreground, the strong compositional element of the temple ruins and the dirt track, the evening light slanting in at an angle. But idiotically I forgot to maximise my depth of field, meaning that while the foreground is in focus, the temple is blurred. Disaster for a landscape photo like this. Also, the haze in the sky means the highlights are blown - I should have used a gradient filter. Finally, if I'd got down nearer the ground, I'd have had more foreground interest. All of these things I've learnt since getting my digital SLR and shooting thousands of images, learning by trial and error what works and what doesn't.

At the same time, the image also demonstrates what can be rescued in digital post-processing. Applying a gradient to a copy layer and choosing 'overlay' as the blend mode, I've been able to rescue a lot of the detail in the sky. Manually selecting the ruins in the mid ground and feathering my selection, I've been able to sharpen the temple ruins while avoiding noise in the sky and jarring over-sharpening in the foreground vegetation. Tweaking the saturation and levels means I've been able to make best use of the colour and light. The end result is reasonably satisfying.

The building in the image is one of three massive temples in the sacred complex to the east of Selinunte, Sicily. On the right are fallen pillars from the an even bigger temple. The ruins of Selinus are very impressive and very thought-provoking. You can clearly see what a huge and wealthy city this must have been for many centuries, as you walk down the excavated main street and out through the massive walls protecting the akropolis. The silted up harbour, now just a meadow, must have been an amazing sight, full of shipping from all over the Mediterranean. Its great location at the crossroads of the ancient world turned out not to be so great after all, when the Carthaginians massacred the population after a short siege in the fifth century BC. They were put up to it by the Selinuntines' neighbours and old rivals, the Segestans.

Details: Minolta Dynax 5, exposure not recorded. Selinunte, Sicily, May 2004. Placemark.