Another from Urban Ugly

This is the shot I promised in my last post, taken from a little further up the creek.

Old ladies of the sea

Final Resting Place

Backing up a few paces and turning over my right shoulder from my previous posting, you see these graceful old ladies of the sea, tied up, abandoned and left to decay.

I guess their final act of service is to provide shelter and a home for all the denizens of the creek, and slowly giving up their nutrients and returning to mud. We like a nice bit of recycling :)


all comments / critique / feedback welcomed

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Extreme contrast

This is one of the first I took in my Urban decay, lost spaces and industrial ugliness photo essay (taken mainly around the dock areas of Plymouth - "urban ugly" for short).

Pomphlett Creek

I'm not sure what it was that drove me to treat this with such high contrast. Perhaps it was the drama of the sky, perhaps the starkness of fine ladies against the muddy bottom of the creek.

In a future post you'll see what lies behind this shot — the gracefully decaying ladies who gave the best of themselves in service on the water.



comments / feedback / critique welcome as always

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Introspective... Sutton Backlane

Every so often when I update the main site, I feature a photo that I really enjoyed crafting. When it's time for the next, I move the current one here.

So here it is. A back lane in the Sutton area, looking towards Sutton Harbour and the Barbican. Shepherds Lane, Plymouth, 2008.


I was doing what I call an opportunist photo shoot - a walk around the areas close to where I live to see what turns up.

I'd seen this back lane many times (people including me have often used it as a cut-through during the rush-hour) but I'd never seen it looking down towards the Barbican and it looks totally different. Luckily we had fairly fast-moving broken, but angry clouds. This gave different lighting conditions by the minute as the clouds scudded across the sky.

Composing and making the capture

Composition was fairly straight forward, it was an obvious choice to go for a vertical format, to frame the whole lane and to give the emphasis to following the road/cobbles with the eye.

I made sure there was a diagonal lead in, using the kerb and the handy dog-leg at the bottom left.

Finally, I made sure that the place where the lane came to a point with the diminishing perspective, was close to one of the thirds' power points. I was happy the way this lead the eye on to the roofs of the Barbican beyond.

The ground was still damp after on-off light drizzle and you could see how reflective it was - so I knew I would get a high contrast shot (just as I like them).

Exposure, ISO etc.

I was using my trusty Canon EFS 17-85mm IS USM. It was a bit dark so I set my ISO to 400. This would give some noise in the sky but to get the wide depth of field I wanted (basically, from my feet to infinity), I needed to be at f9. I exposed for the darker right hand wall and ended up with 1/125 sec. If the light hadn't been changing so quickly, I might have dropped to ISO 200. But there you go...

Digital darkroom

Once it was in the digital darkroom, I treated it pretty much as standard for this sort of challenging shot (one with a wide dynamic range).

I combined three exposures (from the one RAW file) and worked on that. A bit of TLR capture sharpening first, convert to mono, paying particular attention to the overall interplay between the bushes, stone and sky, followed by some noise reduction in the sky.

A tweak on the curves to increase the contrast and a slight adjustment to the levels around the mid-tones and that was it.

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Another for Urban Ugliness vol II

This is one I took a few weeks back that I finally managed to push through the DDR. I've called it Rubble To Be. The general decay of the building appealed to me - roof tiles gone with just the skeletal frame remaining but there was something missing...

After a wander around, I found the complementary element to the shot that I was looking for - the pile of stones and beams up against the building.

It seemed to me that it was "winding up" the decaying building - almost taunting it by implying that very soon, it too would just be rubble.

I often do that, paint a little story inside my head, imagining the conversation that might be taking place if the objects were animate. Ok, so maybe I'm a little nuts ;)

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Hair cut and something for the weekend

Went to the barbers today for a #2 all over and while we were chatting, he said he knew someone who was into monochrome fine art. So after I'd had the chop I went back to my car and got him one of my Urban Ugliness slideshow CDs. Here's hoping... :)

He hasn't been down to Royal William Yard yet but might give the Masa Gallery [Update: now out of business] a try at the weekend now I've mentioned it.

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