tom hills' photostream

Canon 5d mkII
17-40L @20mm
f/16
1/20 secs
ISO 100
Lee Filters 0.6 GND (hard edge) & 0.3 GND (soft edge) inverted

This is a mono conversion of a previous post, as suggested by Joe Rainbow. my black and white skills are akin to my abilities to give birth but i still try - a desaturated layer followed by levels and curves adjustment for contrast and that's it!

the more i come back to this series of images, the more i enjoy them - had a couple of colour versions printed recently and they look great, once i manage a black and white conversion i'm happy with i'll print them off too.

hope everyone is well and wish you all a cracking weekend, off to see The Vaccines and The Arctic Monkeys tomorrow night and cannot wait!

Canon 5d mkII
17-40 L @21mm
f/11
8 secs
ISO 100
Lee Filters 0.9 GND (soft edge) & 0.9

something a little different from me, this kind of image is everywhere these days it seems, i've tried to do something else with this style though and retain some detail in the water - i could easily have put on a 10 stop filter and perhaps simplified the scene even further but 3 stops was enough for me to get a long enough exposure to soften the large waves down but to also retain a little texture on the surface.

black and white is not really my thing, i enjoy viewing it but i feel i'd need to work for a while exclusively without colour to really get a feel for it and to express my feeling and mood effectively through it.

only then could i justify spending out of Silver Efex pro too!!

Canon 5d mkII
24mm TS-E II
f/11
69 seconds
ISO 50
Lee Filters 0.9 GND (soft edge) & Heliopan Polriser

i've just printed this and two other shots from the same location, also in square format and framed them to put on the wall in our bedroom.

this image looks fantastic in print, the tonality just doesn't come across on screen - very happy with this and the others too. there are some purple lupins (i think?!!) on the right hand cliff in the foreground here and also a small collection of pink flowers (not sea pinks though...) that really give the image a nice balance and flow. the greens aren't anywhere near this bright either, a shame they are a little distracting on the monitor.

anyway, the photo; it was taken last summer down in Cornwall, a showery morning which didn't look promising as i left St Ives but went along anyway, the plan was to get down on the beach and look for different angles down there but two things changed that. firstly the tide was higher than predicted so access was through water which i didn't fancy and although the sunrise was at least half hour away, a gap in the clouds to the north west suddenly allowed these rain clouds to start catching some colour.
i descended the cliff to get a lower viewpoint than i'd tried or seen before and composed a wider view than this of the scene - a 24-70mm might actually have been of use this day but i still refuse to buy one. the cloud you can see over Logan Rock, all the way back to behind where i was stood simply glowed pink for a good ten minutes - it was immense! you can even see a slight glint of it reflected in the sand on the beach, the water too obviously caught it as well.

i'll post the exif and some thumbnails of the other two images later today, got some DIY to crack on with :-(

have a great weekend!!

Canon 5d mkII
17-40 L @25mm
f/11
0.3 secs
ISO 200
Lee Filters 0.6 GND (hard edge) & Heliopan Polariser (half a turn)

please take a look on black by pressing L on your keyboard or clicking on the image itself......

This is from a couple of weeks ago, i posted something similar taken just after but think i actually prefer this version.
slightly less "wow" colour to it but the composition is much stronger with the various layers and the complimentary line of foreground water and cloud bank in the sky.

what i'm so pleased with with these few shots from here is partly the skies as they were the opposite direction from the setting sun with some lovely drama to them and also the lack of any real compositional keys on this vast, vast stretch of sand - which anyone who has been there or to a similar beach around the uk will testify, it's not always easy.
luckily for me there were these elements to frame and this image gives me great pleasure with it's all over simplicity - at least i hope that's how it comes across!!

Canon 5d mkII
17-40 L @20mm
f/16
1/20 sec
ISO 100
Lee Filters 0.6 (hard edge) % 0.6 (soft edge inverted)

Not so much the odds in making this shot (although i've been trying to capture something similar for as long as i can remember, maybe as long as three years) so much as the sheer number of frames i recorded on Saturday morning in ever changing light and levels of mist and fog - so much so that i shot a whole 8GB memory card in the process!!

i drove down to Bodiam through conditions that had been pretty consistent all week, light mist in the usual places interspersed with thick fog near to water and exposed places. upon arrival though, through a fog bound Sandhurst, i found Bodiam to be almost overcast and nothing in the way of drama occurring.

this composition i appreciate has been attempted before, i've shot it myself on numerous occasions in all conditions and in spite of the fact it's been done to death, i don't think the lead in line of the footbridge has ever been as pertinent. often it is thrown in as a token ingredient to your archetypal landscape by numbers photo but this time it means everything!!
i was one of four photographers on site Saturday (can you believe one was already set up when i got there?!!) and lucky for me my pre-conceived spot was still free, the concept was to shoot a misty castle with the clear and sharp bridge as both foreground, lead line and vanishing point in to the haze.
when i was out earlier in the week in the fog i was happy to use it as a form of separation but in this instance i absolutely wanted a connection between foreground and focal point and shooting the flora at the moat-side would have meant the moat forming a divide that, along with the mist, would form a kind of 'near - far' composition, of which i'm not a big fan.

i have a frame from earlier than this without the sun trying to break through which if i'm honest i much prefer but i think this one is more 'appealing' so i'll put it out there and gauge reaction before i put that up, or indeed any of the other 348 versions of the same shot, in case there is an aspect i've captured but overlooked!

an interesting debate has been started by the hugely talented Jason Theaker on his last upload which i may attempt to add to when i get round to uploading the other frame i like, we'll see...

thoughts/comments/etc extremely welcome as always, i doubt any photo will do the morning justice, it was an absolute pleasure to experience and witness the changing conditions yesterday.