Memories of summer

Happiness

The inevitable result of mixing a small boy with a warm day on a sandy beach. The excitement and exhilaration in his face is a joy to watch.
Shot from the safety (and warmth) of dry land with my 70-200mm lens.

Seaside Glamour

This was a last minute shot taken just before midnight.

Not sure what inspired us to scramble around preparing the image (other than the many glasses of sangria), but it works quite well.

Shot on my trusty old 18-55mm lens while I stood on the sides of the bath.

How I didn't fall in and kill us both I have no idea!

Big Brother

I took the image as my children played in the waves at the local beach. I think it captures the essence of them at play quite well. I used my new lens wide open at F2.8 to capture this shot at 1/2000th of a second, allowing me to freeze the action.

During post processing I changed it to a Duotone and then added a diffuse glow.

Mist

I grabbed this shot while on holiday in Northumberland.
The river near where we were staying was quite near the coast and it had these adolescent swans constantly patrolling right in front of me.
It was a very humid day, and each time the cold wind blew in from the sea a quite ethereal looking mist would appear almost hiding the swans.

I took this at 1/800th and F22 with two stops of underexposure so that I didn't burn out their white feathers.

Puddle Jumper

It had just stopped raining and there was a large pool of water just outside our house. She decided that the puddle needed jumping in and I was instructed to fetch her wellies. She took her clothes off because she didnt want to get wet. (Thats her mothers genes!)

I took the shot from the safety (and warmth) of the house through the open patio doors.

Filled in with a flash and toned down the grass with a filter. The flash has frozen the splash nicely...

Silhouette

Opportunist shot taken while on holiday in Spain. For once the model wasn't whinging about being cold, but was whinging that the rocks were sharp.

The sun still had a long way to go down, but I wanted to include it in the photo. So after making sure the front of the lens was immaculately clean I managed to get this image.

I had Fujichrome slide film loaded at the time, but still managed to meter it quite well.

Scanned and post processed to increase the colour saturation in the sky.

Whitby Boats

Some small fishing cobbles moored up in the small fishing village near Whitby.

The original image was very flat, so I used an embossing layer to emphasise some of the detail in the writing and the decaying woodwork. See the small image for how the original looked, although you will have to click them both to zoom in.

The result looks like the name has been carved into the boat, and brings much move life to the image.

Water works

Kids, water, and cameras dont mix, so I used my 70-300 to get this from a safe distance. It was a bright sunny day, so with the sun behind her I used a 580ex to fill in.

I like the vivid colours in this shot, plus you can see that she is in her element.

Not a lot of post-processing, just sharpened and boosted the colour saturation a little.

Cold Water

Taken at the local beach during November 2005. The sky was a total non-entity and it was very misty. I didnt re-frame the sky out because I knew that I could post-process a little colour wash to bring some life to it.

The juxtaposition of the people and the sea was deliberate, and I left the subjects far over to the right to emphasize the incoming tide.

The pose is something that every parent can relate to, and requires no explanation at all.

Above and Below

This shot was taken at the same place as my previous post 'dead in the water'.
It has had very little changed, other than the colour saturation increased.
I really like this one as it isn't immediately obvious that the boat in partially underwater, and people often do a 'double-take'.

Dead in the water

This was a derelict boat on the local river near where I live.
As soon as I saw the fence posts behind the boat I realised that I could remove one of them in post-processing to create the cross.
I also changed the colour scheme to make it partially black and white, mainly by removing the green components. This gave me the background that would complement the state of the boat itself. Leaving some partial broken colour on the boat lifted it from the background.