Lost City
Original photo taken at 3 Bassins on Reunion Island, remote place now forbidden to public. Here this place inspired a photobashing in the spirit of Miyasaki...
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Original photo taken at 3 Bassins on Reunion Island, remote place now forbidden to public. Here this place inspired a photobashing in the spirit of Miyasaki's movies
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Dec, 2018Views
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Awards
Contender in the Photography Awards
Action Award
Contender in the Visual Poetry Project
Legendary Award
Elite
Absolute Masterpiece
Outstanding Creativity
Top Choice
Superb Composition
Peer Award
Magnificent Capture
Emotions
Impressed
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Same photographer See allBehind The Lens
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Behind The Lens
Location
This photo has been taken in "3 bassins" - in my homeland Reunion Island few years ago. Most part of it is original, including pipe and my own little brother as the character. I just decided years later to add a couple easter eggs inside to please my daughter which is a Miyazaki huge fan, and enhance the mood.Time
Early morning after a couple hours hiking, it is my favorite time for outdoor photography : the air is cleaned by morning dew and contrasts are amazing. I also like the peaceful atmosphere of early photos, as if time was suspended, which is basically what a photo is...Lighting
High contrast photography is a tricky challenge. Specially with early digital cameras. In this picture the light pit produced by the forest almost creates a cave, so you have to find the right balance between shadows and highlights. There, I exposed twice the waterfall to have it crispy because it is a high value storytelling item of the picture... I could have also corrected the sky to make it look less "burned" but eventually decided not to... because somehow imperfection is part of the magic that makes a digitally edited photo looks real.Equipment
Years ago my first digital camera was a Minolta Dimage 7i, a "pro bridge" released just before Sony took the remains of Minolta. I liked this camera, which produced very nice pictures in bright light but the built-in zoom quality was highly inequal at various lenghts and the camera had an awful battery autonomy of 2 hours max. This photo has been taken without a tripod nor flash.Inspiration
I grew up in Reunion Island, where pirates and explorers stories are not fairytales, but a real, hard, solid part of history. I wanted here to tell a story about looking for these roots. The thing is, as one of my favorite authors Neil Gaiman said in many stories he wrote "your childhood memories of a place are generally bended by the triggers of your imagination back then, which sometimes can be more accurate to describe the real place mood than a realistic description".Editing
I did some postprocessing here years later after taking the original picture, but the main part remains as it was. At first my editing goals was to equilibrate shadows and highlights... but then temptation of telling the true mood of this peculiar place took over, and I added a couple easter eggs like the robot from the Miyazaki's movie Tenku no shiro Rapyuta. This is what it is all about : children rediscovering long forgotten memory places... the best trigger for an adventure still to be written.In my camera bag
I usually try to travel light. A camera, a manual 20mm wide angle lens and a 50mm. A standalone monopod. ND filters, and a remote control to click under 1/50s without producing inadequate movement blur. After years of work in processing commercial photography, I now focus more on storytelling with photography instead of describing things how they are. I discovered recently Erik Johansson's work, the swedish young prodige and it really reconciled me with photographic surrealism. That's what i like to do, what I always loved.Feedback
My main advice is patience and observation. Atmosphere is by definition evanescent. In cinema, to create such pictures in a shot, you will need a whole crew of lighting assistants, masking flags, diffusing or bouncing frames, etc. In photography, you can do it almost alone, but this requires patience : a photo at the right speed for the waterfall, another for the character, another for the bamboos... Like HDR bracketing but with many more shots than just the usual 3. Then back at home you will need a few hours on a single picture to reassemble them all into the final photo. But believe me, the reward is as high as the effort.
