Amongst the Pitons

Whilst searching through a box of old photographs I found this holiday snap of my parents in front of the Pitons in St Lucia.

I am sure my mum would kill me for sharing it but I love this photo as it’s very natural and you can see how much fun they were having in the Caribbean heat.

I believe this was shot with my Canon Ixus APS camera which was small enough to go anywhere and I took several rolls of APS film whilst in St Lucia.

I can’t say all my shots were winners but I like this one (especially as my mum hates having her photograph taken and usually blinks as soon as you press the shutter!).

This is the original scan:

This is much wider than the final image and there is a bit of furniture and the beach hut causing a distraction in the photograph.

Maybe I didn’t notice, maybe I couldn’t move any closer but this is something I am now able to fix thanks to digital post-processing.

Here is the before and after screencaps from Lightroom:

In this edit I did the following:

• Cropped in the image to focus on my parents and remove the distracting furniture
• Desaturated the colours to make them more natural
• Boosted the greens and the blues to give the landscape more atmosphere
• Burned the Piton behind mum and dad to make it stand out
• Added a gradient mask to bring out the cloud detail in the sky

I really like the final edit, it’s updated the photograph and made my parents the focus of the shot.

I wonder if I used my film camera now, whether I would frame this shot the same way. I also wonder if I would notice the distracting furniture!

What do you think of my edit?