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You know, sometimes I envy artists who paint or draw. Being able to start with an empty canvas and decide what to put on it, how to compose the elements in the piece, what colour palette to use and so on must be wonderfully liberating for the imagination.
On the other hand, us poor landscape photographers have to work with whatever nature and man presents and try and make the best of it.
Take this photo for instance. I shot this at Llandulas on the North Wales coast. Now, not wishing to be rude, but Llandulas looks a lot better when the tide's in, if you know what I mean, and I had to be very careful with the framing of this image to only include what I wanted you, the viewer, to see.
Therefore, I left out the cracked concrete carpark where I was standing, and the scum on the beach where the tide was receding, and the extensive pile of large rocks dumped there as a sea defence.
I left in what I wanted to see, the groynes, the sun and the breaking wave, that's all, but if I'd zoomed out a bit the image would have been very different from what you see here.
Is that cheating? Should I have been a bit more truthful in my rendition of the scene? If I was taking photographs for documentary purposes there may be a case to answer, but I'm not. Instead I'm trying to emphasise the beauty I see in God's creation, and inject a little of my personal vision as an artist into every photo I take.
You know, if I was there with canvas and easel on that evening instrad of a camera, what I've photographed here is probably how I would have painted the scene as well.
Filename - groynes 04.jpg
Camera - Canon 5D
Lens - 24-105mm zoom @ 88mm
Exposure - 1/500sec @ f8, ISO200
Location - Llanddulas, North Wales
This image - 800x640px JPEG
Conversion - ACR & PS-CS2
Comments - -1 stop exposure compensation used to retain detail in the sky.
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