This post is also available in: Nederlands (Dutch)

Top photograph in February on Instagram

I live in a lovely little village in the quiet part of Flanders in Belgium, and in the more lovely and quiet part of that village, there’s a canal. And we happen to live right next to it. So looking out of my window, I can see the canal in all its beauty. And that way, it is easy for me to see if there’s a nice sunrise or sunset, and just pick up a camera and shoot a picture of it. This one is no different. Lately, I tend to use the Fujifilms more often, but this picture dates from a little longer, and I guess I wasn’t in the mood to pick up the Canon EOS 5D or a Fujifilm, as I used my iPhone 6 with Procamera for it. Regarding post-processing, it’s a bit mixed. When using Procamera, I mostly use it in the HDR setting (for regular photo’s I mostly use the iOS Camera app), and I save it in normal HDR and dramatic HDR. 9 out of 10, I use the dramatic HDR picture to work with, and open up the saturation. Sometimes, as in this case, I also lighten up the shadows a bit. It’s always a bit of a tradeoff between getting good and hefty contrast, and showing more details.

River sunset ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ #naturephoto #main_vision #landscape_captures #awesome_earthpix #natureaddict #rsa_rural #awesomeearth #skyporn #sunsetsniper #skylovers #sunrise_and_sunsets #sunsets #sunset_hub #sunsetlovers #instasunsets #all_sunsets #igbelgium #antwerp #belgium_unite #travelbelgium #instabelgium #iphoneography #iphoneonly #iphonesia #focalmarked? #foap #eyeemphoto #rijkevorsel #yogateacher

A post shared by Bjorn Beheydt (@bjornbeheydt) on Feb 7, 2018 at 9:57pm PST

Top photograph in February on 500px

It’s funny, how different the responses on the same pictures can be on Instagram and 500px. Last month, the top images happened to be the same, but more often than not, I see that if a pictures does well on 500px, it doesn’t necessarily does so on Instagram. Well, I guess it’s a different userbase to start with anyway.
A little more about this picture… I took it on my way home from the railway station. As I was driving on the little roads between the fields, I saw a promising sky behind me. So, I parked the car on the side of the road, pulled out the ever accompanying Fujifilm X-M1 with XF 35 f1.4, and shot a nice serie of pictures of the sunset and the colorful sky over the meadows.
But just when I wanted to get back into the car, I noticed that the beautiful sky had a just as beautiful reflection on the roof of my car… So before putting away the camera, I shot a last picture, and that was this one. I bet you thought the reflection was in some kind of water, a puddle or pond, right? Nope, just the roof of the car. And that brings me to the part of post-editing this picture 🙂 As I mostly do, I cranked up the saturation, but only a bit. Because on my Fujifilm camera’s, I always put the Dynamic Range setting to the maximum, and set the Jpeg conversion on the Fuji Velvia type. It was my favourite film back then in the analogie era, and it’s my favourite setting now in the digital era. But the most important part of post-editing in this picture, was removing the antenna of the car 🙂