10 years of Magic

Alex Mustard · Issue 86, Sep/Oct 2015 · pp. 50–54

Products mentioned: Magic Filter, GreenWater Magic Filter, Adobe Lightroom

In the beginning... Exactly 10 years ago, almost to the day, I was in the Red Sea with a mad plan. I wanted to take a colourful image of the famous stern of the Giannis D. The composition was a classic. The wreck’s rear end is exactly the right size for a vertical fisheye shot and we’d been shooting her that way since she crashed into the reef in the 1980s. But the picture had always been monochrome blue. Being too big and far away to light with strobes. I wanted a more colourful version and I had tried on my previous visit to the Red Sea, using just manual white balance to restore the colours. Software in those days was very basic, and there was no such thing as white balance sliders in Lightroom (in fact Lightroom was still two years away) the only white balance you could use is what was recorded in the camera at the time of shooting! So I took endless photos of the wreck, all with sli…