Well, my version of the moon which is really a porthole on a boat down in the harbour. It has two men in the moon – the reflection of the top of my head as well as the scratches and reflections which provide a smiley face.
Moon
0
There are a number of these boats down in the harbour, all still in beautiful condition and the subject of much care and attention from their owners. Yawls, they are called, from the Dutch ‘Jol’. When you visit the Harbourmaster’s House on the quayside there are maps showing the old trade routes from Dysart in the 17th and 18th Centuries which run across to Holland, the low countries and Norway. The most visible trade routes these days are the supermarket lorries – Asda, Sainsbury’s, Tesco – making deliveries to the town.
We have had one warm sunny day in what feels like an age, and the light was great – bright but with a bit of mist out on the sea. My dog is getting used to the the routine: walk, photos, walk. He usually does his best to get in the frame but he was more interested in the remains of a sandwich in a bag under a boat.
This was taken with the iphone of all things, while waiting for my partner to pick me up on the seafront. I could see this guy walking into a shot, which always gets my pulse going. Will I get the moment? I tapped on the screen and looked at the images long after taking them as the car pulled up in the car park just as the rain started to drop from the sky.
Here is another picture from the harbour using the 10 stop NF filter. 8 seconds at f11. I quite like the 2 halves of the busy harbour composition in the top half and the way the long exposure calms this down below. Yin and yang I suppose.
Photo taken by contributor Quita, a teenager from England. She has experienced severe self esteem and confidence issues since she was 14-years-old, around the start of her first set of formal exams. Although she wasn’t failing her subjects, the pressure of doing well whilst also keeping up with all her friends started to overcome her and she ended up diagnosed with major depression.
I can't remember re-blogging a photo through my site for a while but I just have to with this extraordinary image via the Broken Light Collective ...
As I mentioned lsat week, here is a long exposure image of Dysart Harbour. 8 second to be precise – I still think I have to guess until I remember that digital records all that kind of data whereas with film and light meter it was a case of one elephant, two elephant…
The water was very calm, just gentle swells of water coming through the harbour entrance so it created more of a sheen than anything, which I like. I was thankful to the angler who remained very still, unaware of the needs of the ND filter
Boats, reflected in the water of Dysart Harbour, Fife. I had also been trying out some longer exposures using a 10 stop ND filter, a couple of which I shall post in due course. These ones were much better without the filter as everything became too blurred in the gently moving water and it just looked like a poor handheld shot. The photo was flipped over to create the feel of abstracted objects in the sky
I had dropped the boys at their judo class and had the best part of an hour to kill. Right next to the school in Cowdenbeath lies the cemetery. One of the things I love about photographing in snow is the new lines that emerge in the landscape, lines that you might not notice when things are green and grey. I used the time to try out the Fieldcam app for the iPad. It’s fun enough and has lots of ‘buttons’ and ‘switches’ that are meant to offer more manual control. But having taken the pictures I always return to the same point with digital images – that you do most of the work after the event. More so than with film, although accepting that you can do a lot after ‘the moment’ I still tend to imagine more about how the image will look before, or really as, I am taking it. Post-processing as it has become. So I tried out both Adobe PS express and Snapseed to see what I could make from this:
I had taken quite a few pictures and as the light dimmed the quality of the images deteriorated into noisy grey mush. No surprise, film emulsions would have coped no better with handheld 1/15th second at dusk using a large camera. The main picture above is using Adobe PS. I then had a go in Snapseed using similar controls.
It has slightly less contrast. I prefer Snapseed’s border offerings but overall like it without as well. I am no expert so perhaps if I could add a very thin plain black border in PS Express then that would be good. It needs something to contain the whiteness but border selections aren’t very subtle.
Fieldcam is definitely worth a couple of pounds and it does have many advantages over the basic in-house camera with excellent focus and exposure settings, but to be honest I am not convinced with in-camera style apps as opposed to just using the iPad or iPhone camera and then using a processing app afterwards
