3332 - The Rose, A Story Of Contrasts


I fondly remember a trip to southern France in (most likely) 1989. Then I was using a Minolta camera, the equivalent of today’s compacts. It had two or three focal lengths that you could choose from. It was not a zoom lens and I suppose the focal lengths were around 28, 50 and 85 mm, or, if there were only two, they could have been 35 and 70 mm.

Whatever it was, of course it used real “full frame” film and, knowing I would take images in churches, I had packed some ISO 400 rolls.

It was a disaster. The camera blew the highlights of the windows and when the color images were developed and printed by some cheap lab, the lab pushed everything into a grainy mid-gray.

Here you see two versions of the same image from Lisbon Cathedral’s window rose. The dark one is the JPEG dirctly out of the OM-D E-M1. I have carefully metered to not blow the highlights, and the image was taken at ISO 250. In the Image of the Day you see what I could make of it by pushing the shadows in Lightroom. For me this looks like a problem solved.