Enjoy my work, each fine art image lovingly
crafted, and take an
emotive journey
wherever it may lead you.
Every artist has something that drives them on.
For me, it's the interplay between:
Through my camera lens and in the digital darkroom
I
explore their interaction, often using black and white and accentuated
contrast as a revealer. Hopefully the final image is
one you'll relate to.
Feautured work...
Every so often when I update the site, I
feature a photo that I really enjoyed crafting. This update's featured
mono is called "Walking
The Dogs"
I'll let you have a look at it before I have my say...
Walking
The Dogs
A shot taken at
Felixstowe seafront of a couple walking their dogs along
the
concert, with a stray child looking on. Winter 2008.
A
beautifully framed and signed A3-sized print of this piece is
available
at the Martin Bush Studio Gallery, Royal William Yard (map)
I was visiting Felixstowe on a day out while
staying with friends in the last days of December, last year. I had my
trusty 17-85mm zoom fitted, complete with hood because of the
lighting conditions.
Because I was with two kids who were full of
beans, I needed to keep my wits about me and be ready for when those
few magic moments appeared. You know the sort, the ones where you
think, "darn, if only I'd been ready with my camera!"
Composing and making the capture
Spotting the potential
Well the lighting was superb, picking out the
eager faces of the beach huts and, with the curve of the coast leading
the
eye naturally to the main beach in the distance, there was plenty of
potential. I just had to hope that someone would turn up to provide the
subject for this wonderful backdrop.
Preparing for the shot
I noticed the steps coming down from the car park
above, so
positioned myself so that anyone approaching from that
direction
would walk into the scene from the right. I then composed so
that the
main beach was roughly in one of the rule-of-thirds power points.
I could see a couple coming down the steps to the
front, and knew the final elements would soon be in place.
Exposure, ISO etc.
Lighting was fine, so there was no need to move
from ISO 100. I always stick with aperture priority and f9 at
the wide angle end of my zoom is enough to get everything in focus from
my feet to infinity. Perfect for this shot. Because I was shooting into
the sun (slightly out of frame to the left), the lens hood was
essential to minimise lens flare.
I exposed for the sky (exposure lock —
point at the sky, half press the shutter release and hold
it, then recompose and finally press the release all the way).
I fired off a couple of practice shots to check the
histogram — I didn't want to blow those highlights.
As it turned out, on
the first practice shot I did, so I re-exposed, making sure I was on
the
brightest part of the sky this time for the exposure lock.
Yep, the histogram was showing all was well. I was ready. Shutter speed
was 1/250 by the way.
Oh, and as I always shoot in RAW, I knew I'd have
some leeway with the exposure, should lighting conditions change
between taking the final exposure lock and waiting for the scene to be
filled with a subject.
The capture
I was ready and, on cue, the couple entered the
scene — with dogs, too! Got lucky with my subjects there :)
The child on the upper concert was a further
bonus, adding to the
story. I think he'd raced ahead of mum and dad, who were still coming
down the steps.
And then I was off for the next shot (Caught
By
The Surf, if you were curious — and, wow, two in a
row were
keepers!)
Digital darkroom
Rawshooter Essentials
The first
part of my workflow is done in
Rawshooter. I initially sort out the keepers from the maybes and the
definite binners.
For each keeper, I then make any slight exposure
and
any initial contrast adjustments before converting to 16bit TIFF, ready
to move into PhotoShop.
For this one, the exposure was ok as taken, and
needed just a tad of fill light before the TIFF conversion.
PhotoShop
Again,
fairly standard for my workflow, I applied
a bit of TLR capture sharpening first,
converted to mono using the black and white filter and judicial use of
the channel sliders.
While adjusting the sliders, I kept an eye
on the interplay between sky and ground but couldn't quite achieve a
conversion that convinced me. I ended up treating the sky with a
gradient fill to tone it down a little.
I did a liitle dodging and burning to the
rightmost beach hut and applied a slight double vignette to bring the
eye's attention to the couple and their implied destination.
I applied my usual final tweak on the curves to
increase the
contrast and added a slight adjustment to the levels to deepen the
shadows
and lift the highlights a bit and
that was it.
A final bit of sharpening and size reduction as I
saved as a jpeg, and
it was ready for upload.
Next
update - "Sky
Lambs"
