I don’t participate in many awards (in fact, it’s been three years since last), so it was a pleasant surprise when I learned that my image ‘Tidal Bridge’ was awarded with a second place in ND Awards’ aerial category in the professional section.
I’ve been following ND Awards for several years now as I enjoy the high quality images that quite often are a bit less mainstream than what you find in certain other awards. This year was no different so I’m honoured that my image was recognised by the jury.
DJI Mavic Pro 2 @ ISO100 - f/5.6 - 1/40th second
About the Image
I captured ‘Tidal Bridge’ earlier this autumn in the Lofoten Islands while we had a small gap in the clouds. For a few minutes, the wind calmed down and the sun broke through the rainy clouds, which resulted in a beautiful light hitting the mountains just past the bridge.
Knowing that this location has interesting colors and patterns in the sand during low tide, I decided to take the drone up and take advantage of the light. I had about 15 minutes until it started raining again so I made sure to make the most out of it.
Since the DJI Mavic Pro 2 (read my review here) isn’t able to shoot with a vertical orientation, I decided to capture a vertorama. In other words, I tilted the camera slightly down, took a picture, tilted it further up, took one more, and repeated until I had enough frames to cover both the bridge and some sky above the mountains.
Back in post-processing it was a fairly easy job to merge the images using Lightroom’s Photo Merge -> Panorama function. I then worked with the color contrast, local contrast and a the sharpness.