Dark Beach Ride

July 3, 2008 | Category: Image Processing

I managed to pick a great day for my day off; sunshine and bright blue skies were the order of the day so I decided to take a trip to the beach. I opted for somewhere I haven’t been before, Cleethorpes, and was pleasantly surpirsed by the large beach.

The first photo that I have processed from that day is quite a light, colourful image of a childrens ride. When I took it I had a light ND Grad filter and a polarising filter on the camera so the colours are quite vivid, but I want to try and capture something about the British seaside in the picture and my enduring memories from recent trips to British seaside towns is the contrast between the stunning views looking away from the town and the relatively run down, verging on seedy, nature of the town itself.

This is the original image:

In the final image I have only made two changes, besides sharpening it a little. The first is that I have cropped it to reduce the space above the ride to try and make it feel more enclosed. I could have cropped it more at the bottom to get this effect more pronounced but I wanted some of the shabbyness lower down and so made a compromise.

The second change is that I have duplicated the layer in Photoshop and used a multiply layer blend to make it darker and highlight the shabby areas a little bit more while keeping the colours vivid.

This is the final image.

I’m not sure I have achieved exactly what I wanted and I may well come back to this again in future.

A larger version of this is published on my photblog: www.arickmann.co.uk

2 Comments

Cheryl Smith (http://www.culturesmithconsulting.com/news)
on July 3rd, 2008
1
Beautiful photography Andrew, and nice touch up work as well. I’m looking forward to following your photo blog for ideas and inspiration.

Happy Thursday!
Andrew (http://www.arickmann.co.uk)
on July 3rd, 2008
2
Thank you Cheryl,

Happy Thursday? That’s the best end to a comment I think I have ever had! Happy Thursday to you too.