Saturday, April 04, 2009

Soft light by the sea

click photo to enlarge
Where yesterday's image was all about strong, bold colour, hard edges and "in your face" impact, today's is just the opposite. It's a shot taken two days earlier, during my visit to the Norfolk coast, and is soft, with muted colours and more sublety, an image that sidles up to you rather than plants its feet in your way and won't be ignored.

I've said elsewhere in this blog that there's absolutely no chance of my photography moving to the point where I have a "style that is all my own", the point to which the great and good in photography urge us to travel. I've never believed that to be a goal that we have to seek, or that a photographer is necessarily a better practitioner if it happens. But, as I say, for me it's academic anyway because I like to point my camera at anything that comes my way.

Cycling west along the foreshore at Sheringham, the concrete promenade narrowed, then came to an end by a lifeboat building. I walked out onto the shingle to photograph this lonely looking boathouse. I was glad it was there because it gave a point of focus to my composition, a small but definite man-made structure, whose hard white edges contrasted with the cotton-wool clouds, and the earth colours and natural forms of the cliffs, beach and sea. It also gave some visual weight to the left of the image to counter the quite dominant cloud on the right.

The location looks deserted, and it was. However, just out of sight on the cliff tops people in bright checks, unlikely caps, and loud socks scurried about in twos and fours, trying to coax small white balls into tiny holes with "implements ill-adapted for the purpose." Yes, it's the location of Sheringham Golf Club!

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 11mm (22mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/640 seconds
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.7 EV
Image Stabilisation: On