Mumbles photography
Yesterday I took my camera down to mumbles. I went out on the bike and cycled along the prom from Swansea marina to mumbles pier. A great ride if you've never done it. The weather was great, a crisp autumn day with solid sunshine. I have been keen for a while now to get down underneath mumbles pier and take some photos of its structure. The rust , seaweed and decay is quite incredible, it literally is, on its last legs! and its this I envisaged would make and interesting photograph.
Before I set out I already had images in my head of the shots I wanted to capture and this is why I'd been meaning for ages to get down there when the tide was out and take some photographs. I'd seen similar shots by other photographers of jetty's and pier structures that stretch into the horizon and look old and I wanted to see if I could re create something like this. The lines and its size can disect the photograph in a multitude of angles and its this kind of triangulation that makes good landscape photographs come to life. By the time I had got there however the sun had done its disappearing act for the day and what I thought would look good in my head ended up looking just like the grey old pier that it really is.
I continued regardless and snapped away walking right the way underneath it ensuring I had photos of both sides which only took around 5 - 10 minutes. I then cycled back to the house, made some lunch and settled down in the studio plugging the camera into the mac. Just as I thought, the photos were unspectacular!
The fun part of photography these days however is enhancing the photograph in photoshop. I had some old files on my desktop which I thought I'd mix with the pier shots. These files were digital atmospheric images that I'd created using a package called bryce 3D. Bryce is a seascape and atmospheric generator; a piece of software that can create lifelike clouds, terrains and seascapes. Using the layers tool in photoshop I overlayed and burned these bryce sea and cloud formations into the pier photographs. The results can vary and there are literally a million and one different outcomes to mixing and layering in this fashion. You just have to remember to save your image when it looks right! as sometimes I find myself getting carried away and then being unable to step backward to the image that I liked initially that was 10 steps back in photoshop!! A tip here when doing this kind of work is to either save as you go along or alter the number of backsteps before you begin.
The results above and below give you a very colourful industrial feel to mumbles pier. Its way over processed and the one below has a softer more watercolour feel to it which I was quite suprised by and prefer. Its almost like a pen and ink watercolour of mumbles rather than a photograph of mumbles pier. The other thing that makes the image work is the red colour of the lifeboat house. The great thing about the image below is that although its not the sort of photo that you'd want hung on the wall of your home as a canvas; it has however made me extremley eager to go up to somewhere like tower colliery or some industrialised welsh valleys and create similar pictures using these methods. Which is my next mission! and I will post the results on here when I have time to do this!
