In 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… 😉
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.
