Last Sunday a bunch of col­leagues and Steff&I went on a little hike to the ”Great Sugar Loaf”. It is (by orders of mag­nitude) less impress­ive than the real deal, but it makes for a very nice hike (provided it’s a nice day ;-)).

After a bit of ran­dom walk­ing and not really find­ing where the track star­ted we finally were ready for the ascend. Up there, we were really sur­prised to find hordes of people going for the sum­mit, and quite a few of them rather not suit­ably dressed for the tast… But they were lucky and the weather played along nicely.

So on the way up I took this spon­tan­eous photo of Łukasz’s girl friend Christina. Apart from the strong flare in the bot­tom left (I still had my polar­iser on when I took this shot) a pretty nice photo, except that it was com­pletely over­ex­posed. I’ve recovered as much as I could from the RAW file, but large parts of the sky are still blown out. Also, as a res­ult, all the dark tones were way to bright and looked rather washed out. How­ever, pho­tos like that don’t have to be lost — just increase the black level until the dark tones are back dark again. You will then get a nice high-​key type of pic­ture with tons of con­trast and nobody will com­plain about blown out skies ;-)

PS: My pho­tos from the hike can be seen here.