La Huette Switzerland

Untitled (La Huette, Switzerland, March 2005) copyright 2014 Douglas Stockdale

Serendipitously after reading the recent release of Brassaii, Paris Nocturne, I went looking for some of my night-time photographs of  Fiuggi that I had made in 2010 & 2011.  Then I stumbled on an unfamiliar file folder of Europe from 2005. Yep, I am sometimes easily distracted. Squirrel!

I had jumped off at the local train stop for La Huette, and can’t recall if I was heading to or from La Chaux de-fond in Switzerland. The next train would be stopping in an hour for me to resume my journey. Which was fine as it was an opportunity to be a photographe-flaneur around this village and adjacent country side. I don’t think I actually made it into the village itself but instead wandered around the edges. I was not on a particular quest as this pre-dated my project work. It was just to look and see what some of this place looked like in photographs. I recalled that this place appeared pretty banal.

When I returned home, I thought some of the images to be interesting, but I think that was when I was using PhotoShop 5.5 or 6 at time. I had lost the snow highlights in the foreground and the image looked pretty dull; low contrast and flat.

So when I re-discovered these images, I could immediately see a little more potential with a potential RAW conversion available with my PhotoShop CS3 (yep, not running the latest or most current version of PhotoShop). I was correct, there were more highlights in the foreground that I could salvage, but I had still lost a lot. I also increased the contrast range by increasing the Black slider. After the file opened in PhotoShop, I added sharpening and tweaked a Curve layer to further increase the blacks/shadows.

Now this image appears a little more similar as to what recall that I saw (Probably better than my memory of this location). What I think of as a nice singular image.

Cheers!