The most powerful and timely photograph I’ve ever taken…
Mukorob - The mighty Finger of God - near Asab in Namibia. Shot on Nikon FE2 - FujiChrome 50.
My story and workflow
This is a story a long time in the making, 37 years to be precise, and yet it’s all about timing. As a street photographer I know all about the pressure to capture the moment, the one you see in your mind’s eye as you compose the shot and pull the trigger, nailing it or losing it forever. But this is a story about a different type of timing, one for the ages!
I’m reminded of the story, apocryphal I’m sure, about a famous Scottish hotelier who would ask his new intake of management recruits what the most perishable item in the hotel business was. The group would always suggest food and beverages much to the old man’s disgust. He would eventually point out that it was the hotel room, “… you can’t sell last night’s empty room tonight!”
In the late eighties I was working in South Africa as a staff pharmacist at the 2,000 bed Pelonomi Hospital in Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State. My passion then, as now, was photography.
My father who was a keen and accomplished photographer had taught me the ‘rules’ early on, and instructed me not to take ‘boring’ photographs! I am dedicating this website to his memory as I have always tried to follow his photographic advice - I hope he would be proud of my efforts thus far?
I must confess that I only went to Africa, armed with my trusty Nikon FE2, to photograph the wildlife. The backstory is that I’d grown up as a young boy sitting on my grandmother’s lap at bedtime being read Clifford Parker’s magnificent 365 Things to Know - a page a night, that was our routine - and at 6 years old I could confidently tell you the difference between a dromedary, or Arabian camel, with its one hump and the bactrian camels with of course we all know has two. This seemed vital information at the time. By the end of that year - day 365 - I was expert in lions, cheetahs, leopards and all manner of beasts that roamed the African savannah, so, off I popped to photograph them - it all seemed perfectly logical at the time - my own version of destiny I suppose.
Back to the Pelonomi Hospital, and I worked every shift I could get to earn extra leave days. I fell in love with Namibia, or South West Africa as it was referred to then, early on and spent every holiday I had accumulated travelling the length and breadth of this magnificent country. After a lifetime of travel it is still my favourite place on this planet - it’s just uniquely special.
I used to plan my road trips based on the places and animals I wanted to photograph and the Mukorob, the emotive Finger of God, was at the top of my list, and so in 1986 I drove into the southern Namib desert.
That was a very fortunate decision, to go to the Mukorob early in my African odyssey, and my timing proved critical, because two years later, in 1988, on 7 December, the Finger of God wagged at us for the very last time.
Mukurob collapsed under its own weight after millions of years of erosion, a shudder from the Earth and a final rainstorm.
Geologically the Mukurob consisted mostly of sandstone. The structure was 12m high and up to 4.5m wide, and weighed some 450 tons. What made Mukorob so special, however, was its base. Just 3m long and 1.5m wide, it was much narrower than the mass of rock which it supported.
Mukurob was once part of the great Weissrand Plateau before 50,000 years of erosion slowly isolated the structure from the rest of the plateau. You can learn the history of the Mukorob here, but sadly you cannot now see it as it once was, its magnificent defiance set against that deep azure blue Namib sky.
Workflow
I have been diligently looking through my many boxes (100 plus) of KodaChrome and FujiChrome slides trying to find certain images I know I’d taken at that time. Now that’s more of a challenge than you’d believe!
The next task was digitising them and I was worried about the quality of my original work and the physical state of the slides after decades stored in a Glasgow garage. But I needn’t have worried, the original images were better than I expected and time had not wreaked havoc on the cellulose!
The two pictures of the Mukorob that adorn this blog post I shot 37 years ago on my Nikon FE2 with FujiChrome 50 stock.
Digitising my slides
I did my research and purchased a JJC Film Digitising Adapter and Light Set which sounds much grander than it is. It’s basically a long extension tube that screws onto one end of your lens with a slide carrier at the other end. You also get a clip on LED light that allows you to set the colour temperature which is a real plus giving your light a consistency - I ran with 5,600K after a little experimenting.
I used my sharpest close quarter lens, the Fujinon 80mm f2.8 macro, and set about photographing my prize slides. I almost forgot the slide prep - before scanning each slide I had to blow off dust and lightly brush any particles off each slide and then deal with the odd fingerprint that had welded itself onto the film (lens cleaner worked well).
As always, I shot the slides in Fuji RAW (RAF) using my trusty X-T4 set at ISO 160 (the base setting) and f8, which is the sweet spot for this lens according to the pixel peepers on YouTube!
Post Production
This is where the fun and frustration starts…my average edit is currently running at circa 3/4 hours, excluding coffee and frustration breaks!
Now, I am told by my mates that I have a very slight tendency towards being diagnosed as having a mild dose of OCD (it should of course be CDO in proper alphabetical order), so this means, amongst other things, that I have every pro-level RAW editing package on the market (Capture One, DXO everything, ON1 plus add-ons and Topaz the lot!) and I struggle to agree with myself on a final edit!
I have, however, learned to finish an edit, go to bed and wake up in the morning, stumble into my study and through squinted eyes, and after a mouse wiggle to waken up the screen, look again. I love the mornings when I look into the monitor and scream, “Yessss!” - then I know I have nailed it. That seems to work for me.
So what did I do with Mukorob?
First off, I ran the digitised RAW image of the slides through Topaz Photo AI to clean up the inevitable grain and noise, a little judicious sharpening and then upscaling the image X 2 (necessary because you have to crop out the slide frame and then you end up with a much smaller subject area).
Topaz are currently hugely invested in Photo AI and produce near weekly updates, so the software just keeps getting better and better. I exported my Photo AI file as a DNG and popped it into DXO PhotoLab where I cleaned up dust and minor marks.
The grand finale was a tiff edit in Nik’s newly update suite of tools (it doesn’t like DNGs), Nik Collection 6, which only dropped this week!
I used Nik Color Efex 6, one of eight standalone apps in the collection, and worked with two of the tools, Detail Extractor and Pro Contrast. I was surprised how little editing the cleaned-up image actually needed, minor tweaks and I had what I consider to be a true and lasting tribute to the Finger of God.
Next, I will print the finished Mukorob image on my Canon Pro1000 at A2 (420 x 594 mm or 6.5 x 23.4 inches in old money) - go big or go home, right? I’ll print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta fine art paper (semi-gloss) which will handle the colours, tones and contrast in the image beautifully. This will show me how robust and skilful, or otherwise, my clean up and edit of two 37 year old 35mm FujiChrome slides really was - nowhere to hide at that size!
I console myself with the time spent editing and go for a well earned breakfast.
Comment below or reach out if you have any questions.
Thank you for reading. David.
