It’s sometimes possible when editing photos on a computer to look too much at the histogram and not at the actual image. We can focus on highlights and blacks, and on getting a good spread of tones, which is all rather academic. What you really need to do is concentrate on the final image and how you see it. I loved the soft tones of the RAW image for this shot and decided to try and enhance the gentle tones and light…
En-route to see a client yesterday I took my constitutional 5 minutes to stop at Ainsdale beach. There was total cloud cover and not a lot of light. I noticed a few gulls following the shore line so I went for a longer zoom to capture them flying above the fence line.
What do you do when you want to shoot a landscape, but there’s nothing interesting nearby? Use a long zoom, of course! Shot from Ainsdale beach you can see Formby and North Wales in this shot.
Southport and Ainsdale beaches are vast, flat and featureless. As a photographer you have to latch onto any object of interest, even if it is a solitary shell in the middle of that vast, featureless expanse of sand. It’s a good job I like minimal photographs as the Sefton coast lends itself to this sort of shot!
Some days you go to the beach and it’s empty, some days it just seems far too busy! I captured these kite surfers on the beach at Ainsdale, the sun backlit the kites making the image feel nice and bright!
Another stop off at Ainsdale Beach on my way home, another sunset.
This is another shot from my 2 minute dash to the dunes by the Lido at Ainsdale. Isn’t it strange, despite that fact that I wasn’t living in Southport when the Lido was the Lido, it’s still called that.
I like the soft and pale tones that I managed to capture in this shot – a little bit different from the usual heavily saturated sunset photos that you see. I think it captures the mood of the time. Soft and gentle rather than harsh light.
Driving back from an appointment in Formby the sun was sinking fast as I approached the Pontins roundabout. After a long day I was keen to get home, and the light was weak, not stunning. I decided to give it a chance and headed for the Lido car park. The wind was blowing the sand off the top of the dunes, I had to walk backwards over the crest. The light was poor, there was no time to get the tripod, so I upped the ISO and took a few shots. A lot of the shots were too slow, and blurred, but I managed to grab a couple of nice images. This Ainsdale Beach sunset shot was just as the sun was half way gone. The colours can go a bit strange at this time of the day, but I like the results…
You can’t beat the combination of seaside marram grass and clouds with a sliver of sea in between – a cloudscape with marram!
OK, I admit it, these aren’t the colours that I saw when I took this shot. It was a bland, overcast day, the tide was out and the beach flat and lifeless save for the pooled water in the dips of the sand. What is a guy to do but play around with the colours and create something a little more atmospheric? It’s amazing the difference colour makes to our perception of an image. The original is quite flat and, perhaps, boring, but add a little colour into the equation and the whole becomes much more interesting.