This is how I made my most famous photo
It was 2019. I was doing my best to post as often as possible on Instagram.
I had no systems or a detailed plan on how to grow my account.
I was just posting photos.
This day wasn't much different from all the other days before this - when I had posted to IG.
But it was my 1st time posting a photo with my brand new astrophotography lens - Laowa 15mm F/2.
I was a little nervous to post the photo. It was different. But I was curious what the response to it would be.
Often, I got around 300 likes on average for a photo.
I posted the photograph.
And I got 300 likes already on the first evening.
I was over the moon.
I couldn't believe it was doing so well.
And I was afraid of posting this the entire time!
I was thinking it'll still gain probably some likes overnight.
"It could be my most liked photo", I thought.
I was staying at my grandma's. I put the phone off. And played some cards with my grandma.
I went to sleep...
The Morning
I wake up. The 1st thing I do is to go to my phone. (Which I never do nowadays anymore.)
And I open Instagram. To of course check how many likes there would be.
I couldn't believe it.
"Over 1500 likes??!!"
I wanted to scream.
But I stayed calm.
The likes kept rolling in.
It didn't seem to stop.
The photo reached 3300 likes - and close to 60,000 views.
It was my first viral post. And I didn't see it coming at all.
I remember Googling football stadiums that could fit 60,000 people - just to see how many people actually had just seen my photograph.
I saw many. I... couldn't believe it.
It was a huge milestone for me.
I'll never forget that.
Today, that photo has been seen 10s of millions of times.
And it still is my most popular photograph to date.
This is the photograph - and I'd bet you have seen it. (Keeping in mind, I have re-edited it a bit since 2019. See the 1st version here.)
The photo is called Lost in the middle of nowhere.
This photo meant, and still does, a lot to me.
When I was going through difficult times at school, I referred that I made this photo.
I thought if anyone ever found my Instagram account, they'd not bully me if they saw how much popularity this photo got. (This was before TikTok where it was a million times easier to get views.)
That photo kept me going. And still inspires me to this day.
It's also the photograph that I sold the most for - to my friend who goes by the nickname TapirOne.
Today, I wanted to teach you everything that went to make this photograph happen.
I will:
show you the inspiration for the photo
what was my thinking behind the composition + settings - and
what was the editing process like
Let's start, my friends.
What was the inspiration for this photo + how I made it
There are a few ways I get ideas for my photographs:
1) I just see an interesting subject - or scene
2) I watch a movie or series which inspires me to create a still photo - or
3) I see a photograph or other artwork from someone else - and that gives me inspiration.
For this photograph, the latter was the case here.
I saw a photo which I thought was absolutely incredible.
The path especially was something I got inspired by.
This scene looked out of this world.
(I mean it's most likely made of 2 or more images, but it's magical.)
So I wanted to create a new photograph by taking inspiration from this.
So... I did.
When I went to the location I was looking for paths. And there was one. But I also made my own one next to it.
I photographed it - me being at the end of the path.
But... as it was my 1st time using a manual lens, the photo was entirely blurry.
I was pissed off.
I had just taken probably my best photo ever. But... it was blurry.
I thought should I bother going and trying the same shot again the following day?
And thankfully, I did.
But now it was colder (or at least not warmer). It was around -30C. And the path I made the previous day was gone.
It had snowed overnight.
So - I made another one.
I set up my tripod. Had the path in the middle of the frame. Put myself to the end of the path - and snapped the shot.
Now - when I took this, I didn't know something called an intervalometer existed in my camera.
What that means is, that you can set your camera to take photos automatically between certain time periods. For example: To take a photo every 4 seconds.
So - I didn't use this as I didn't know it was a thing.
Nor did I have a remote controller.
So - I used my phone as one.
That made this so much more painful.
Imagine it's -30C. And there's cold wind hitting you.
The exposure is 15 seconds. So you must not move an inch. Otherwise, the shot will be blurry.
You might think that already sounds uncomfortable.
But I was without gloves.
The entire time.
Why?
Because I couldn't put my phone in my pocket whilst the camera was about to take a shot. Otherwise, it would've disconnected from the camera.
So I put my gloves on the snow in front of me. And put the phone on top of them.
That's how I made the shot to work. But... yeah, it was painful.
In the editing phase, I had to then Photoshop the gloves and my phone out - as you'll see in a bit.
The exact settings I used
Shutter speed: 15 seconds
F-stop: F/2
ISO: 500.
Now, settings always depend on the location and the brightness there. Let's dive deeper.
ISO
ISO 500 seemed to work fine here. And I was careful to not go too far - as I didn't want my headlamp to be overexposed.
I knew I could increase the brightness of the darker areas in editing while still getting detail in those areas.
If your exposure is too small, you'll lose details you can't recover.
Often with night photos, you'll need to use much more than ISO 500.
But here, I was fairly close to some streetlights. So I was able to use a smaller ISO. And I was able to have my headlamp on the brightest mode.
Nowadays, I often don't have it at the maximum brightness to avoid overexposing it.
F-stop
You want to use the lowest F-stop possible when photographing at night.
This will bring in the most amount of light into the sensor of the camera. And will result in better-quality images.
Shutter speed
There's something called "The Rule of 500"
What this means is:
Divide 500 by your focal length.
So - as I was shooting at 15mm - this was the calculation I had to make:
500/15=33.33
This means I can shoot up to 33 seconds and still get sharp stars.
However, as I was in the photograph, I couldn't use 33-second exposure.
We humans can't stay exactly still even for a second.
So 15 seconds was pushing it already quite much.
From my experience, you can push the exposure to 15 seconds, but you really must try to not move at all.
Of course, ideally have the exposure like 1 second. But this might not be possible or intelligent - depending on the situation.
What was thinking behind the composition
The composition might confuse some. Especially those, who've learned to not put a subject in the middle of a photograph.
And well - I rarely do that nowadays. Because often it doesn't work.
But here - it did work.
Why?
It worked because the photograph is in balance.
There's nothing to the left nor right of me.
It's just the path and the person.
The message to the viewer is simple:
A human is in the middle of nowhere. And he watches the sky.
Now, of course, there's more to the story and how people see this.
But that's the simplified story.
Because that is the story, the composition works.
If the story I wanted to tell was complicated, the shot should have more parts to it. Or composed differently.
The composition rules are made to help you.
But there are times when you can break them - such as here.
Let's break the composition more down:
Leading lines
This is the main thing that makes this photo work:
All the lines lead to the person - and then to the sky.
The yellow lines highlight the lines leading to the person - and to the sky
The path leads to the person. The person watches the sky. That along with his headlamp - creates a strong leading line to the sky.
Basically - when a person watches this image:
The path guides their eye to the person. Then they follow to see what the person is watching.
Clean image
I touched on this a bit. But I intentionally cleaned the photograph of distractions.
Not that there was a lot to be removed, but I removed some stuff. (Which you'll see in a bit.)
Colours
What colours are present?
Blue & White, right?
Originally there was orange too.
Now, orange and blues work together extremely well.
But - here I wanted to just use blues.
And I believe that made this photograph look a bit more magical.
There were some orange hues in the clouds on the horizon - but I decreased its saturation by a lot.
The Saturation settings. I left blues as they were.
I didn't want it pops up.
I wanted all the focus be on the person and the night sky.
(Why did I also decrease red and yellow? Because at times it'll look funny if you only decrease the main colour. That same area could have a little bit those other colours too.)
Now, let's see what was the editing process like.
The rest of the editing process
This is the RAW file:
To those who don't know what's RAW and how it differs from a JPEG:
JPEG is an image your camera has already processed.
RAW is an image the camera has left you to process. It includes much more data compared to the already processed information.
In the same way, if you buy processed food, it has fewer nutrients than unprocessed food.
(I know that's a weird example lol. But I think it's a good one :D.)
So now it was time to bring that shot to the final photo I had in mind.
I edited the shot both in Lightroom and Photoshop - but you can do everything I did only in Lightroom if you so wish.
Let's see how this all happened. The editing order isn't correct, as I edited this in 2019. I can't remember the exact order I edited it. But let's go through what I did overall.
Cleaning up
Now I had to clean up the image.
As I mentioned earlier, it was important for me to clean the image so that all the focus is on what I intended.
Mainly I removed a couple of things:
1) A rock just colliding with the person:
The rock was distracting. Especially when it was bright.
I removed it so that there's nothing interfering with the person. I wanted the entire focus to be on him.
2) The phone and my gloves that were sitting on the snow:
It made a difference.
This is what I pretty much always do - remove distractions. As it creates a massive difference in the final photo.
Oh, and I also brushed some black colour on my hands in Photoshop. To make it look like I had gloves, lol.
Changing the colour temperature
This was a needed thing.
It didn't look that warm when I took the shot.
But I shoot with my white balance at auto. Because I know I can correct it in post-production.
And so that's what I did. I just slid this slider to more cold. It was as simple as that.
The RAW temperature and Tint
The final colour temperature and Tint
Dodging and burning
It was time to do some dodging and burning.
What is this?
It basically means:
Brightening some parts of the image - and darkening some others.
I brightened:
1) The path
2) The headlamp & the person
3) The stars a little (I believe)
I darkened the spots that already were dark:
1) The edges of the photo - and
2) The ground around the path
This always makes a massive difference. And is a massive part of my workflow.
Denoise and sharpen
Nowadays I try to do this before I start the main editing process.
But with this shot, I did it later.
The shot wasn't perfectly sharp. But honestly, I didn't know what a perfectly sharp photo would look like with a manual lens.
But I knew I could make it sharper.
So - with TopazAI I made it sharper.
I used their Sharpen tool. And then Topaz DeNoise to get rid of the excess noise. (This was the time before Lightroom DeNoise. Nowadays I use that instead.)
Doing all this made the shot much better. ESPECIALLY the DeNoisening part.
The 1st Lightroom changes
These are the 1st changes I made to the RAW file as a whole:
I wish I could tell you all the settings I used - and all the changes I made to this image. But back when I edited this, my process was a mess.
I have literally 10 versions of this same photo imported to Lightroom Classic. And 2-3 in Lightroom CC.
And I went back and forth with the sliders, lol.
But with new photos, I'll have the exact changes - and in order. :)
Last Lightroom changes
Often I leave the Clarity and Dehaze sliders as the last thing I change.
Why?
Because you can't go and reverse the changes so easily afterwards - IF you have moved the photo to somewhere else for editing (such as Photoshop).
Here I seemed to have slid the Clarity 1st up - and then later down. (Again, I'd not do it this way now).
I often put Clarity down to create more of a dreamy look. I might also combat the difference it makes with Texture to get some texture back - but I didn't do it here. (It might have not been in Lightroom back then.)
Wrapping it up
That's how I made my most popular shot to date.
I hope you found that insightful.
This was my 1st ever time breaking down a shot from the very past - and in written format.
I know it's not perfect - but thanks for letting me experiment and hopefully teach you something new in the process.
I also offer 1-1 photography and photo editing. So - in case you want to directly learn from me - you can book a 1-1 session with me here.
DM me on IG @hugoraphy with any questions you have about it.
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Till next Saturday my friends,
Hugo
(P.s. Feel free to also give some feedback on this Letter. I know I've not done Letters like this before. So I'd love to hear whether you'd love to see more of these or not. :) )
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