To The Beach! (But A Little Too Late...)

It's never a good idea to try and take landscape shots near mid-day on a bright, Sunny morning, but I needed the exercise, so I took a stroll down to Stokes Bay for some bracing sea-air....

IOU Taken With Fujifilm S5700, Aperture Priority, F6.3, 1/320th, ISO 64, Focal Length 63mm, Hand-held, Polarizer

This is very soft - I was shooting at maximum zoom, trying to compose the shot with the yacht against the Isle of Wight, and get the clouds in too. The Sun was very bright, so I used my Polarizing filter to get more contrast into the clouds.

I probably worked it too hard in Photoshop Elements - it looks like the sky has been cloned in from another scene - and it could do with some burning along the sky / island border to reduce what looks like a HDR halo (this isn't a HDR image).

If I'd got to the beach a couple of hours earlier, with the Sun lower in the sky and not as bright I would have ended up with a much better shot. The clouds would still have been side-lit (even more so) and I wouldn't have had to post process it so much. But then again, maybe the there wouldn't have been a nice little yacht to add some interest to the photograph...

Beach Huts Taken With Fujifilm S5700, Aperture Priority, F6.3, 1/250th, ISO 64, Focal Length 15mm, Hand-held, Polarizer

This scene looked so much better in real life - but I couldn't get the image right in post. I tried HDR and a B&W conversion, but returned to a slightly tweaked original for the Flickr upload.

What attracted me was the way the Sun was painting shadows on the entrances to these posh beach-huts, and the way that this stark man-made structure contrasted against the soft sky.


I think I'll have to return to Stokes Bay soon, but a little earlier, or a lot later, in the day to capture some better light...

Thanks, Rob.