Photowalk 61 - Gosport Ferry Gardens

I managed to kill two birds with one stone yesterday, pop down to Gosport Town Centre to the bank, and take some photographs in the Ferry Gardens (or Falklands Memorial Gardens I think they're now called).

For a few minutes the light was really nice, and it gave me an opportunity to scout out some scences and angles for our year long flickr assignment, "Where I Live".

Dreamer.

This photo should really have been called "Slip of the Finger" or "Blind Luck". I got home and copied the pictures from my Fuji S5700 to my PC, ready for CD and online backup, and as I was going through them I saw this one.

I definitely didn't take it on pupose, all I can think is that as I was walking along trying to get a better angle of the tower, with my camera held low and by my side, I must have pave pressed the shutter button by mistake, and the camera took its own photo!

I edited the image in Photoshop, using the black and white adjustment layer with the red-filter preset. I also played with the levels, trying to get the top right black, and the bottom right white, with a nive variation of shades inbetween. I masked out the top of the lamp post, but it didn't make much difference.

Coming up with photo's like this, through blind luck or otherwise, really make you think about the importance of "capturing the moment", using unusual angles and perspectives, and throwing out all the usual rules.

Spinnaker Tower

Better big.

My little Fujifilm S5700 / S700 did me proud on this shot. For a few minutes really dark clouds were behind the tower, yet bright Sunshine was shining onto it from above me and to the right.

I know my budget bridge camera isn't the sharpest at longer focal lengths, so I stopped down to F5.6 (in aperture priority mode), and kept the ISO down to 64.

The next trick was to look at the scene and understand that if I took it with standard settings the Tower would be "Blown Out" and detail lost. This because the camera would meter the scene, see all the dark clouds, then over-expose it. So I used exposure compensation to knock it down (to the left ion the Fuji's screen) a full stop, (a big notch on the screen) and took a photo. (I also tried a couple of different settings, but this one was the best).

In Photoshop I ran a pass of Noise Ninja because the Finepix's sensor doens't always deal with smooth gadients of a similair tone very well, then tweaked the contrast with a Curves adjustment layer. For the print version I may well use an "un-Noise Ninjered" version.

I want to do another version of this with some foreground interest, to give the tower some scale (it's huge), and maybe with some more dramatic clouds in the background. Unforunately the Sun rises well to the right of the building, but in the evening it can be bathed in beautiful colours, so I'll try that too.

Brick Paving In Sunlight

I just liked the lines, shapes, and subtle colour differences in the bricks in this one. Post processing was mostly levels.

Well, thanks for looking at these images, please feel free to leave comments below, or click on the photo's to be taken to Flickr to comment on them there.

Cheers, Rob.