This series of photographs and their associated histograms covers images with multipeak histograms, which come is many differing forms. None of these images is perfect, but they illustrate the fact that sometimes the perfect image is not possible given the constraints of the scene – shadows, bright skies and haze, sometimes they are just unavoidable.
Histogram 1: A church and hazy hills
This photograph is taken in Locarno, Switzerland, with the church in the foreground the Madonna del Sasso. The histogram is of the multipeak variety, with few highlights. The left-most hump (①) represents the majority of the darker colours in the foreground, e.g. vegetation, and the parts of the building in shadow. The remaining two peaks are in the midtones, and represent various portions of the sky (③) as well as the lake, and hazed over mountains in the distance (②). Finally a small amount of highlights (④) represent the clouds and brightly lit portions of the church.
Histogram 2: Light hillside, dark forest
This is the Norwegian countryside, taken from the Bergen Line train. It is a well contrasted image, with only one core patch of shadow (①), behind the trees in the bottom left (there are a few other shadows in foreground objects such as the trees on the right). The midtones, ②, represent the rest of the landscape, with the lightest midtones and highlights composing the sky, ③.
Histogram 3: Gray station
This photograph is of the train station in Voss, Norway. It is an image with a good distribution of intensities, with four dominant peaks. The first peak, ①, is representative of the dark vegetation, and metal railings in the scene, overlapping somewhat into the mid-tones. The central peak (②) which is in the midtones, represents the light green pastures, and the large segments of asphalt on the station platform. The third peak, ③, which transitions into the highlights mostly deals with the light concreted areas. Finally there is a fourth peak, ④, which is really just a clipping artifact related to the small region of white sky.