Lonely Cloud on the Coast of Madeira
Shot on Fujifilm X-T2 and 18-55mm f/2.8-4 lens.
In the summer of 2018, I spent about a week in Madeira, a Portuguese island located a few hundred miles off the coast of Morocco. My three friends and I rented a house with a gorgeous view from the top of a cliff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean on the west coast of the island.
It was only once we got to the house that we realized it was arguably located in the most remote part of the island. It took us almost an hour to drive to Funchal, the capital city of Madeira, and an hour and a half to get to the other side of the Island. But the western part of Madeira is also where the weather changes the most quickly. A hot afternoon can evolve into a gloomy, stormy evening, even in the middle of summer. On one instance, we decided to go see a lighthouse we could see from our house on a late afternoon, and while it was only a ten-minute drive, the weather quickly changed dramatically, making the lighthouse a rather moody spot.
The remoteness of the house and the weather made us stay at our rental more often than we had anticipated but it ended up being for the best because I would have been unable to take one of my favorite pictures ever otherwise. Staying at the house by the swimming pool, something I usually never do, are the reasons why I had time to get nice moody photos of the sea, as well as more peaceful ones, including some of the sun setting right into the Atlantic Ocean.
While we did go around the island to discover Funchal and go on hikes, there were a couple of afternoons at the house that were especially peaceful, and it’s on one of them that I took a picture of a lonely cloud above the Atlantic Ocean. I had managed to only go to Madeira with one backpack that was filled to the brim, the Peak Design Everyday Backpack 30L and one camera with one lens, the Fujifilm X-T2 with the 18-55mm f/2.8-4 kit lens, which is surprisingly good for a kit lens, and it is with this lens that I took the photo.
Shooting and editing:
The picture on the left is the original, flatter, RAW version of the picture while the one on the right is the final version, after edits.
I zoomed in 33mm (or about a 50mm equivalent for full frame cameras) to have a big enough cloud while having enough space around to make it clear it was above the sea. And because there was so much light, I took the shot at 125 ISO and f/9.0. In terms of edits, I actually did very little apart from lowering the exposition by a full stop, and lowering the highlights, shadows, whites and blacks while increasing the contrast.
Adobe Lightroom is not considered the best editing tool to handle Fujifilm RAW files, which is why I chose to increase the texture instead of the details, while reducing the haze to give the photo a more ethereal look. The only color edits I made are making the color temperature a bit cooler and turning the blues into more aqua shades. Finally, while I usually try not to delete elements that are present on raw files, the electric cables were clearly too distracting, which is why I photoshopped them away.
This photo also has a special place for me because it was the second picture I ever printed, and the first whose printing process I completely saw. It makes such a big difference to see one’s photos on a screen, whether a computer or a phone, and on paper. That’s probably the main conclusion one should draw here: print your pictures. It doesn’t matter if it is a small or a big print, don’t leave all your photos on your computer. Give them a new life by printing them.