Focus of Episode: Editing Photos of Dark Spaces

In this episode of The FIX, I show you the editing behind a shot that was posted as Photo of the Week on November 20th, called Ice Lantern in Serendipity Cave. I took the photo in the summer of 2016 on a caving trip near the town of Crowsnest Pass where I grew up.

The cave itself starts out as a very small hole in a rock wall halfway up a steep mountain and is nearly impossilbe to spot without accurate directions, or better yet, with someone who has visited the cave before. You can to crawl though a very tight space to get through the entrance, but it then opens up to a large chamber with an ice floor and a large ice formation that you can see in the photo. We decided to place a headlamp in a hole in the ice and found that it lit up the entire chamber with a strange blue light like a gigantic lantern.

The editing of the photo is very simple and is done solely in Lightroom. I start out with a basic edit to get the entire image looking roughly how I want it. And then I dig into the local adjustments to tweak small areas of the photo separately. There is some work done with radial filters, graduated filters, and some brushing.