In June 2023, a friend and fellow photographer invited me to discover l’Île Verte.

The island is in the St-Lawrence Estuary and can only be reached by boat or helicopter. On the north side of the island is the oldest lighthouse in Quebec, built in 1809. The coordinates are 48.05111158079961, -69.42364233580302.

I was initially unsure how to capture the image. I didn't want to take the standard tourist snapshot, so I looked for alternative viewpoints. I spotted a point of colored rocks on the other side of a small bay. We headed to this point, and I found my composition. I liked the colored lines of the rocks and the distant line of the forest heading to my subject, and the colors in the scene. The beautiful soft clouds in the background and the open space on the right side completed the composition.

Handheld, I composed and framed the scene using a 40 mm focal length. To achieve a perfect exposure (ETTR), I overexposed the scene by 1.7 stops.

Later, in postproduction in Lightroom, I created a sky mask and performed a dehaze set at +20. I duplicated and inverted this mask and put the shadows to +100. Then, I pressed the AUTO button in LR to let the software perform all the other adjustments automatically.

Looking at the final image, once again, I was very pleased to have taken the time to find this composition and not just take a souvenir snap.