click photo to enlarge
One of my recent, self-imposed goals was to shoot more contre jour images. On a recent morning I managed to do just that on a visit to Boston in Lincolnshire. A small fleet of diminutive fishing boats operates out of the town, sailing down the River Witham into The Wash and nearby North Sea waters to search for their quarry. They berth alongside a small quay on London Road, not too far from the centre of the ancient settlement. Opposite their resting place is the Port of Boston with its single dock, large sheds, railway line, cranes and container lift. My photograph was taken from the quay as one of the boats came in on the tide. The railway swing bridge that has to open for each passing boat can be seen in the background.One of the decisions you have to make when shooting into the sun is what to do about that very strong disc of light. There are three possibilities: leave it just out of frame, include it, or place it behind an object in the shot. On this image I chose the latter course, moving until the sun was behind a crane. The out-of-camera file had much more contrast than my final image. Shooting in RAW allowed me to recover a lot of the detail in the sky and elsewhere, but I tried not to reveal so much that the photograph lost its feeling of morning light. I was really pleased that the shafts of sunlight were hitting the leaves of the trees on the left of the image. It gave them a sufficiently strong presence to balance the "visual weight" of the boat and bridge on the right of the composition.
For another photograph of the port area of Boston see this post.
photograph and text (c) T. Boughen
