Lokrum Island from Dubrovnik wall look out post

Lokrum Island from Dubrovnik Old City Wall

There are quite a few unique features to photograph on Lokrum, so long as you don’t mind walking. The monastery is interesting, but it’s so beautifully kept with perfectly manicured lawn, peacocks and rabbits, that it loses the whole feel of “ruin”. You can’t go in anywhere – all doors were locked when we visited and it looked like there was some restoration work being carried out.

Attention Game of Thrones fans … as most GoT fans know, a lot of filming is done in Dubrovnik, and around the corner of the Monastery, there is a small door which leads to a section with lots of videos of interviews with actors from the show, behind the scenes footage and … drumroll … a replica Iron Throne … which you can sit on.

We found the two main areas to photograph were the Dead Sea and “Rocks”. The Dead Sea, is a small pool, which is a very interesting shade of bluey-green. If you are photographing at midday, as we were, the lighting is very harsh – half is in sunlight and half is in shade – so we stuck to photographing the cave area which was in shadow.

Online, Tim had seen a picture of an area called “Rocks” which showed an archway in the rock opening up to the sea, and he felt sure that we could create a better image. We nearly missed this because it’s quite well hidden, but when we finally found it, it was stunning. (Wear sensible shoes for this – lots of clambering over rocks). Once again, shooting at the time we were there, meant very harsh lighting. (Unfortunately, you can’t stay towards sunset, because the last boat in October goes back at 16:00 to the mainland). So, we’re back to the same problem of harsh light and dark shadows. We can get around this to a certain degree, because we’re shooting RAW and can pull a lot of detail from the shadow and highlight areas. During these situations, we tend to bracket our pictures. This means shooting a normal exposure then a number of stops under and over – (number of stops depends on the harshness of the light and most DSLRs and mirrorless cameras have a bracketing function). This then enables us to copy details from one image into another, that are too extreme for the sensor to record. One can also use various pieces of software to put the images together as an HDR image but be careful using this as it has a tendency to look “overcooked”.

Again, as we were hobbling our way around the island with our very stiff legs from the previous days, we were heading to the Fort Royal. This comes after a long walk along the “Path of Paradise” … sadly anything but a path of paradise haha, as it’s all up a very … long … hill. But it is worth the climb. Once in the Fort Royal you get an awesome view over the city. The Fort is also an interesting structure to photograph.

Just don’t miss the last boat back!

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Dubrovnik City Roofs with beautiful colours and textures

Our day on the city walls was slightly overcast with a tiny bit of blue sky. Initially this might seem a bit of a downer but in fact it made making images a lot easier because we didn’t have to worry about bright sunlight and harsh shadows. Of course, sometimes hard light can give you beautiful textures on walls, but we’ve compensated for this in post-production by intensifying the micro-contrast in RAW, known as Clarity.

Dubrovnik City Walls from Fort Lovrijenac

Starting from the Pile Gate entrance (pronounced Peelar and is the main entrance to the Old City) , we walked up and even though we’d spent a few days looking at the buildings, it was jaw-droppingly spectacular from this new angle. There is just so much to photograph, but you need to be aware every time you make a new image, of your composition, because it’s so easy to get distracted by the beautiful architecture and then you just end up recording the scene. The first half is undoubtedly the best. Being able to look down onto “King’s Landing Harbour” with part of the wall in the foreground, adding depth to the scene produces some spectacular images.

Dubrovnik City Walls

There are a number of cafés and toilets along the top where you can stop for ice creams and coffees etc. We really enjoyed photographing the oubliettes and produced some incredibly interesting and surreal images from these. For a slightly different view, so you don’t keep getting the wall in your shots, Tim ended up holding the camera high above his head, having first focussed and checked exposure, using the angled viewing screen on his Sony to compose the shot. This works particularly well on Tim’s Sony with an adjustable back screen, but is a bit more hit and miss with my fixed screen Nikon.

Using the swivel screen for a higher vantage point 

This is quite difficult because of the bright light and would have been worse had it been sunny. NB: A lot of mirrorless and DSLR cameras have the ability to transmit the live image to an iPhone or iPad and this can be useful in these sort of situations, where one of you photographs and the other directs from the tablet screen.

On one afternoon as we were sitting for a rest, just outside the Pile Gate, Tim thought he’d drop his Zeiss lens onto concrete. It rolled into a gutter of the same diameter, narrowly missing falling through the gutter and out the other side and plummeting down 2 storeys. Phew!

Pile Gate

Cable Car

Some great images can be recorded from the top of the mountain, looking down onto the Old City. To do this, you need a trip up in the cable car. Sadly we did this on the only day it rained. But as it was our last day, we still managed a romantic meal in the Panorama restaurant looking down over the town as the lights came on and illuminated it all. Romance 8. Photography 1!

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