Today, I want to show you a photo that I made to a wonderful Salento little city: Castro Marina. I was there for the holidays but always ready with my camera and, in this post, I will tell you the technical aspect behind this shot.

Castro Marina

Castro, the pearl of Salento, with its sweet, enchanting atmosphere, generous nature, its enchanting sea, landscaped beauty, is one of the most beautiful tourist destinations in Salento.
Castro is a coastal resort of Salento, on the Adriatic. It is 15 km from Otranto, 45 from Lecce, 50 from Gallipoli and 25 from Leuca. It rises at the center of a magnificent coast arch from Otranto to S. Maria di Leuca. The inhabitants are about 2500, but in the summer there are crowds of tourists attracted by the town. Whoever arrives in Castro immediately enters a pleasant dimension that forgets the stress and chaos of the city, lulling away from emotions that follow and involve the soul and body.

The shot

The position of the shot was really diffucult to find. I were on a cliff with my tripod. Yes, I use a tripod due to the fact that It was in the middle of the night (If I remember correctly It was about 11:00PM) and there was a very low light. Once the tripod has been set I started to try the right frame to capture. I used a Canon 1200D with the lens Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS II. These are the technical data of the photo:

• ISO 200
• f/16
• 25mm focal length
• shutter speed 30 sec
• manual focus

The manual focus allowed to me to take a sharp shot. Unfortunately, with low light the autofocus of my camera doesn't work well.

Post-Production

As you can see in the photo that was a good shot but the sea, was all black. I used for the post production Adobe Lightroom. In that case the main task of the post production is to highlight the real color of the sea.

Since the photo was taken with the RAW format file, the informations about the colors was hidden insideit. I just had to extract the informations with the tools provided by Lightroom. In fact I used a regulation brush with exposure, saturation slided up on all over the sea and you can see the result in the right photo.

I hope you enjoy the photo and the exaplanation

Se you to the next shot :)