The giants causeway is probably one of the most famous natural attractions on the island of Ireland. Located on the northern coast of Northern Ireland, the famous landmark is a series of volcanic rocks that formed into hexagonal columns. It’s somewhere I always wanted to see in person, with the formation being featured in geography text books when I was younger, not to mention practically every tourist board promotion for the region. Finally this past weekend, I got to see it in person.

My first reaction: “Is that it?”

I was expecting such a famous tourist attraction to be a bit of a let down in reality. Anyone who has seen the Mona Lisa in person knows what I’m talking about. I was also expecting to have to dodge some tourists to get descent photos, but little did I know just how bad it was. The rock formation itself is interesting, but you always see it in pictures in ideal light, from the right angle to make it look like a “giant” formation.

It is not.

The columns themselves are only about a foot across. And they’ve become quite worn over the years for obvious reasons. In the dull overcast morning, that I suspect is pretty typical of the area, they’re quite underwhelming. In fact if it wasn’t for the throngs of tourists, you might even miss it.

But the real frustration was said throngs. There were a lot tourists and visitors crawling all over the rocks. People were all over them, climbing onto precarious positions, in most cases to get selfies because apparently in the twenty first century your own face is more compelling that a 60 million year old natural wonder. Incidentally, one group of visitors, asked me to take their photo with their phone, and I was happy to oblige. I lined up a nice shot, framed the whole group and the causeway, and took a pretty descent photo. They weren’t happy and started calling out angrily at me in broken English: “Take vertical one please”.

Oh dear god.

Back to my own efforts, and I tried to get a good position to frame the people out, but it was next to impossible. Eventually I settled for what I could get, figuring it was a job for photoshop.

When I got back to my laptop and first opened the photos, I was kind of surprised at how dull the morning had really been. But my first edits in Lightroom actually brought out the texture and the detail in the basalt, and that was already a good start, so I knew I possibly had something to work with. I had taken some closeups and they came out reasonably well, but I still wanted to get some of the wide shots I took to look at least partially interesting.

So, over to Photoshop.

My first thought when trying to remove the people was that this was going to be an impossible task, but it turned out, that content aware fill was pretty adept at removing the tourists. There were a few areas that still required a bit of further cleanup, and the sea is a bit weird looking closeup, but after a bit more photoshopping I was happy enough with the results. (If it was for commercial purposes, I’d probably spend a bit more time). It was still looking a little flat so I decided to use Photoshop’s sky replacement to get a little colour into the sky. Eventually, it was looking more like what the brochures portrayed. Now to repeat the process on the other photos..

In the end I had a couple of images that I was happy with. Are they perfect? No, but they’re nice pictures and more than good enough for web posting, or even personal prints.

There will undoubtedly be people who think that this kind of thing is wrong, that it’s somehow cheating, or that it doesn’t represent reality. But it’s not supposed to. It’s art for arts sake, not news or documentary content. The only thing I feel guilty about is perhaps perpetrating the stereotypical image of the causeway as being super amazing. I’m sure if I could have gotten there at dawn (not sure how as the place is ticketed) or dusk I could have gotten better photos, with less photoshop required. Similarly, if I was brave enough to walk over the more precarious parts I probably could have gotten a more dramatic angle, but we weren’t actually there for photography. There is a couple of dodgy bits of cloning in one of them, but apart from that, given the constraints of…well, reality, I think they came out reasonably well.

(Incidentally, I’m not saying its not worth seeing, but just temper your expectations, and if possible go in the off season)

For those interested in the technical details, these were all shot on a Fuji X-E4 with 18-55mm lens. Processed in Lightroom and Photoshop using Lightroom’s “Enhance” function for the Raw Conversion.

The Giants Causeway: Reality vs Photos