Beacon Camera Club

One from a short break in Northumberland last October - taken from Stag Rocks north of Bamburgh castle, one of my favourite photographic vantage locations over the past four decades. It seems to be a fave of one or two other togs these days!

One of our favourite areas. The beach and dunes are amazing.

Peter J wrote

Also, sorry I meant to ask. Was this a long exposure with ND filter or just a few seconds shutter to get the softness in the water?

Hadn't realised the exif data was missing. No, I didn't use a very long exposure. It was just a second or so. The only filter used for this shot was a circular polariser.

Not the critique thread, I know, so I'll pose a question rather than making a statement! Do you think that the castle pales into insignificance because of the perspective of the shot?

Perhaps Peter was making a deep philosophical point about humans in relation to the earth.

Roger

Well, Roger isn't a million miles away with his explanation. I chose to place emphasis on the foreground rocks because of the large number of people on the beach near the castle. By doing this, the iconic shape of the castle is still very recognisable, but you can only spot all of the people if you examine the image very closely. However, I have to admit I still wasn't very comfortable with the composition. A squarer crop can be used to make the castle more prominent. This is something that I have tried, but I'm unconvinced that it provides a significant improvement compositionally.

I'm feeling a bit guilty here as this - as said - isnt the critique thread, so please don't be cross with me, Peter: I offer in all humility and apologies a slightly edited version of the image, albeit a bit blocky becasue I have only the lo-res jpeg to work with. The people are easy to remove whilst the proportions of the image are a bit more difiicult to alter. I think a square crop helps a bit too, maybe?

I'm intrigued by Ian's editing and would like to know how it's done. It's not a simple crop as the perspective has changed the foreground rocks seem to have moved to the right and the castle does look more prominent.
I think all of the treatments have merit, it's a familiar landscape to me but one I've never tried to capture. When we can travel again I might have ago but would be delighted to get anything as good as this.
Cheers Bill Fleming.

BillF wrote

I'm intrigued by Ian's editing and would like to know how it's done. It's not a simple crop as the perspective has changed the foreground rocks seem to have moved to the right and the castle does look more prominent.

But Ian can move mountains

billf wrote:I'm intrigued by Ian's editing and would like to know how it's done. It's not a simple crop as the perspective has changed the foreground rocks seem to have moved to the right and the castle does look more prominent.
I think all of the treatments have merit, it's a familiar landscape to me but one I've never tried to capture. When we can travel again I might have ago but would be delighted to get anything as good as this.
Cheers Bill Fleming.

BIll - on the first-posted image (not the second, cropped version) I used a lasso selection tool around the castle, including a lot of sky/sea/beach. Copied that with Ctrl-C, and immediately Ctrl-V pasted it back in. Ctrl-T lets you then transform the size of that paste, and I enlarged it to defeat the exisiting perspectivity (is that a word?) and moved it to cover all the previous castle pixels. Then, I applied a mask to that paste, and black-painted on it with a soft-ish brush at low flow percentage to gradually blend the edges of the paste so that it looks natural.

For the rock, I did the same, but included all the sea to the left and edge of the pic. Ctrl-C, then Ctrl-V, Ctrl-T again, moving the pasted rocks to the right, to get a chunk of them out of the way, with newly-pasted sea covering the left of the old rocks. Again, masked and blended, then the whole image cropped square from the left edge.

It would be much better with a hi-res image, of course.

Some serious Ninja Photoshop manoeuvres. With all this spare time I no longer have any excuses. I really must try and improve my PS knowledge, I'm happy with LR but I think it's time to move to "The Dark Side"
Thank you for the explanation.
Cheers
Bill