Categories
Landscapes

Sometimes you just have to play with the colours

Red Cloud BeachOK, 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.

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Southport Pier

Purple Pier, Southport

There are just so many ways to shoot one pier. Getting down on the beach at sunset is one great way to get the silhouette of the pier framing the setting sun.

 

Purple Pier

Categories
Dunes Landscapes

Past the Post – Ainsdale

One of the few features among the marram grass on Ainsdale dunes is the fencing. This selective focus shot puts the fence post in the frame.

 

Post

Categories
Southport Pier

High Tide, Southport Pier

High Tide, Southport PierIt’s not often that the tide comes right in on Southport Beach. It’s less often that high tide is really high. Once in a while it is possible to see the pier completely over water from the breakwater outwards. Yesterday was on such day. The light wasn’t great, but it was better than we’ve had for some time. Of course, high tide’s not of itself a pretty scene. The water is so shallow that the waves are small and choppy and the sand is stirred up along with the waves. The best solution is to take a long exposure of many seconds to smooth out the sea. This shot is a 50 second exposure which gives the sea a smooth texture, with whorls and patterns caused by the movement of the waves and tide.

Categories
Southport

Ramada Sunset

Evening LightDriving home along the coast road a little bit earlier than usual, just as dusk was settling I stopped off in the car park on the coast side of the Marine Lake. The sun was setting behind the Marine Way Bridge providing a warm tone to the bridge and the Ramada hotel. The other end of the lake was a colder bluer tone. I love the split of colour in this shot. There was no heroic sunset, just the gentle softening and warming of the light as the sun dropped below the horizon.

Categories
Dunes

Minimal Marram

Minimal Marram Sometimes a particular view or style can become an obsession. Perhaps it’s a range of tones, or maybe it’s a minimal point of view, or a particular point of view, or possibly it’s a combination of many things, perhaps not even consciously understood that all come together to produce the one thing that photographers want – a distinctive – something that is recognisably you.

For me the focus on marram, sea and sky has been impressed on me by the nature of the Sefton English coastline. The entire stretch of coast from Liverpool to Preston is straight, flat and featureless. In order to make an interesting shot certain attitudes have developed: a relentless compositional minimalism, removing even more features in order to produce a clean aesthetic; this minimalism extends to reducing the palette to simple blues and greens with a hint of muted yellows in the sand; a low point of view is probably a result of the compositional needs, but in itself produces a distinct viewpoint on the marram and sky of the Southport coast.

The result is simple, clean images with a muted palette of tones. These aren’t dynamic images in the sense that they produce an immediate ‘wow’, but they are the kind of restful, easy on the eye, hang on your wall and enjoy for years to come type of images, timeless in a sense – timeless in the way that the marramscapes of grass, sand, sea and sky will always be.

Categories
Dunes

Before the Rain

Before the Rain

Driving along the coast road in the beautiful autumn sunshine I got to Ainsdale beach with time for a 15 minute break before moving on to meet a client. I parked up just as the clouds covered the sun. As I wandered and hunted out a good viewpoint the sky darkened, then came the drops, then the camera went back in the bag to keep it dry, and then I went back in the car to keep dry. Of course, as soon as I had to move on to make my appointment the sun came out again!

Categories
Landscapes

A Soft and Gentle Sunset on the Southport Coast

Soft Light SunsetIn the hope of bagging a bright and colourful sunset full of spectacular reds and golds I tramped off along the big bank that runs from The Plough roudabout around the village of Banks and off towards Hesketh Bank. Running along the edge of this bank, in parts, is a low lying area that fills with water, mainly tidal as this area is all close to sea level. Although fairly small in terms of area, as a foreground element it works really well for my sort of minimal landscapes. I generally use a medium ND graduated filter to balance the sky, but in the case of this image I also took multiple exposures.

It’s an HDR, using 3 shots to slightly improve the dynamic range.  I’ve finally bitten the bullet and got CS6 to go with Lightroom, so I can merge to HDR in PS and then drop the 32 bit file back into LR for processing. Rather than ramp up the contrast on this image I’ve actually lowered the contrast significantly to try and produce a softer view of the sunset – this is probably more like what I actually saw than some of the other images that I will post later on… 😉

Categories
Landscapes

Marshside Sunset, Southport

LightnessAlong the coast road that runs from the north of Southport right through to Ainsdale in the south and beyond runs a broad stretch of land that comprises marshland to the north, Marshside, and marram to the south towards Ainsdale. At the very top of this stretch of marshland lies a small pool of water alongside a fence. It’s quite bland in normal circumstances, but, with the right light reflecting off the water quite stunning results are possible.

This image was taken at sunset, through the fence, with the sunlight reflecting off the surface of the water. A long exposure was used to smooth the water.