Another Point of View
I think that each of us makes our own line in the sand. There are those for whom anything goes, while others are content to bend things very slightly. While many want their image to tell the world what they saw, others want to share how they felt. "Photograph what you feel, not what you see," I read somewhere recently. Of course there are also people who refuse to use the editing suite, or filters. Personally I'm in favour of whatever it is that makes you happy. We each get to decide where our boundaries are. I was reminded just yesterday that Mads Peter Iversen, a landscape photographer I much admire and respect isn't averse to adding a completely alien sky to an image - he has an aurora that he quite happily adds over whatever sub-arctic landscape he's set his viewfinder on. His prerogative of course, and in his honesty he makes no apology on the subject and knows it will divide opinions; it's not something I've ever been tempted to do. Perhaps you have - nobody's judging who's right and who's wrong. It's all about choice after all.
I think I probably fall into the category of wanting to share how a view I took a picture of (or some pictures of) made me feel. So while for me personally, a sky that wasn't there is going to remain in the "Add Unicorns Menu," I'm no stranger to the practice of combining a few images taken within a short space of time to pull together the elements I wanted. Living in an area where the sea is the obvious and ever changing subject, I'm quite relaxed about taking the greatest hits from a series of incoming waves and blending them into a single frame. Ironically Mads taught me this through his Photoshop editing course, the first few chapters of which very quickly reminded me how little I knew, having always resorted to its easier to use cousin in Lightroom. I still do, but Photoshop grabs a lot more of the action than in the days when I knew what the spot removal tool was for, but the rest of the screen was just a magical hinterland of unexplained buttons. In fact most of the rest of the screen remains a strange and mysterious place to me, but gradually I'm making use of the bits I've begun to make sense of.
In this example, I'd recently happened across a sea stack at Gwithian I'd never noticed before, largely because I'm usually somewhere on that headland across the water waiting for the sky to change. But on this occasion I'd decided I needed brighter light to catch the flight of the gulls without resorting to an ISO setting of about two hundred gazillion, even though the courses they plotted were slowed by a strong cold northerly that was making the day a challenge for us all. I was glad I had a warm van with a gas stove, a kettle and a diesel heater waiting for me just a couple of hundred yards away. Two days earlier I'd stood here on the dunes above a receding tide and taken another composite, before deciding that what I really wanted was an incoming surge wrapped around the base of the stack. A tempestuous sky would have been more to my taste, so I'll probably end up going again when the conditions combine in my favour - preferably with a bit of side light to illuminate the gulls against a big black cloud. I'd better have my waterproofs handy that day.
What I'd also decided I needed was the sea to be moving at the right speed, and in my world there are only three of them; "forever," "just enough to blur the motion" and "really very fast." "Forever," is my go to setting when the sea can't be bothered to do very much, while "really very fast" only comes into play when it's ferocious - something I never seem to get quite right - I usually just come home with six hundred nondescript grainy white splodges on the memory card and end up deleting the lot. "Just enough to blur" entails the happy deployment of the six stop and a shutter speed usually somewhere between half a second and two seconds, and that's where I wanted to be for the sea itself. The gulls arrived within quick succession of one another - very good of them to be so obliging as that cloud was shifting towards us all at quite a pace and the blend might otherwise have been a lot more tricky to deliver. Have you spotted the fourth gull yet? Neat eh? I had to wait for it to be in that exact spot for it to have any chance of joining the party. The overall result isn't the sharpest picture I've ever delivered - I'm going to blame the wind and the fact that my tripod needs to acquire some spikes. Bad workman, tools, you know the rest of the proverb. Still, the picture does carry me back to that windy afternoon on the clifftop in the dunes, watching the gulls forever flying eastward - exactly what it's supposed to do.
So there's my confession, although you'd have worked it out for yourself anyway. I do composites from time to time, but only when I haven't travelled too far from reality. After all, those gulls had probably arranged themselves in far more interesting attitudes together across this scene at different times throughout the day. Obviously they'd have got a lot further in 1.3 seconds than the lie I've tried to sell here suggests, even against that last icy blast of winter, but the textures in the water wouldn't have been quite so much fun. And that line in the sand I drew for myself - it's hidden there somewhere under all that water, probably moving all the time.
And whether you're a purist or a fantasist, or somewhere in between like most of us, I hope you've got a plentiful supply of chocolate to get you through the weekend. Have a good one.
Another Point of View
I think that each of us makes our own line in the sand. There are those for whom anything goes, while others are content to bend things very slightly. While many want their image to tell the world what they saw, others want to share how they felt. "Photograph what you feel, not what you see," I read somewhere recently. Of course there are also people who refuse to use the editing suite, or filters. Personally I'm in favour of whatever it is that makes you happy. We each get to decide where our boundaries are. I was reminded just yesterday that Mads Peter Iversen, a landscape photographer I much admire and respect isn't averse to adding a completely alien sky to an image - he has an aurora that he quite happily adds over whatever sub-arctic landscape he's set his viewfinder on. His prerogative of course, and in his honesty he makes no apology on the subject and knows it will divide opinions; it's not something I've ever been tempted to do. Perhaps you have - nobody's judging who's right and who's wrong. It's all about choice after all.
I think I probably fall into the category of wanting to share how a view I took a picture of (or some pictures of) made me feel. So while for me personally, a sky that wasn't there is going to remain in the "Add Unicorns Menu," I'm no stranger to the practice of combining a few images taken within a short space of time to pull together the elements I wanted. Living in an area where the sea is the obvious and ever changing subject, I'm quite relaxed about taking the greatest hits from a series of incoming waves and blending them into a single frame. Ironically Mads taught me this through his Photoshop editing course, the first few chapters of which very quickly reminded me how little I knew, having always resorted to its easier to use cousin in Lightroom. I still do, but Photoshop grabs a lot more of the action than in the days when I knew what the spot removal tool was for, but the rest of the screen was just a magical hinterland of unexplained buttons. In fact most of the rest of the screen remains a strange and mysterious place to me, but gradually I'm making use of the bits I've begun to make sense of.
In this example, I'd recently happened across a sea stack at Gwithian I'd never noticed before, largely because I'm usually somewhere on that headland across the water waiting for the sky to change. But on this occasion I'd decided I needed brighter light to catch the flight of the gulls without resorting to an ISO setting of about two hundred gazillion, even though the courses they plotted were slowed by a strong cold northerly that was making the day a challenge for us all. I was glad I had a warm van with a gas stove, a kettle and a diesel heater waiting for me just a couple of hundred yards away. Two days earlier I'd stood here on the dunes above a receding tide and taken another composite, before deciding that what I really wanted was an incoming surge wrapped around the base of the stack. A tempestuous sky would have been more to my taste, so I'll probably end up going again when the conditions combine in my favour - preferably with a bit of side light to illuminate the gulls against a big black cloud. I'd better have my waterproofs handy that day.
What I'd also decided I needed was the sea to be moving at the right speed, and in my world there are only three of them; "forever," "just enough to blur the motion" and "really very fast." "Forever," is my go to setting when the sea can't be bothered to do very much, while "really very fast" only comes into play when it's ferocious - something I never seem to get quite right - I usually just come home with six hundred nondescript grainy white splodges on the memory card and end up deleting the lot. "Just enough to blur" entails the happy deployment of the six stop and a shutter speed usually somewhere between half a second and two seconds, and that's where I wanted to be for the sea itself. The gulls arrived within quick succession of one another - very good of them to be so obliging as that cloud was shifting towards us all at quite a pace and the blend might otherwise have been a lot more tricky to deliver. Have you spotted the fourth gull yet? Neat eh? I had to wait for it to be in that exact spot for it to have any chance of joining the party. The overall result isn't the sharpest picture I've ever delivered - I'm going to blame the wind and the fact that my tripod needs to acquire some spikes. Bad workman, tools, you know the rest of the proverb. Still, the picture does carry me back to that windy afternoon on the clifftop in the dunes, watching the gulls forever flying eastward - exactly what it's supposed to do.
So there's my confession, although you'd have worked it out for yourself anyway. I do composites from time to time, but only when I haven't travelled too far from reality. After all, those gulls had probably arranged themselves in far more interesting attitudes together across this scene at different times throughout the day. Obviously they'd have got a lot further in 1.3 seconds than the lie I've tried to sell here suggests, even against that last icy blast of winter, but the textures in the water wouldn't have been quite so much fun. And that line in the sand I drew for myself - it's hidden there somewhere under all that water, probably moving all the time.
And whether you're a purist or a fantasist, or somewhere in between like most of us, I hope you've got a plentiful supply of chocolate to get you through the weekend. Have a good one.