"A Day in the life of a Landscape photographer"

I can't remember what day of the week it was, I think it may of been a Friday night; We'd driven up to worms head intending to get in the water and have a surf. When we parked in the car park that overlooks the wonderful Llangennith beach and worms head we'd decided that the was a little too small and that it wasn't worth the trek down the steps to get in and get our heads wet for just an hour surf until the sun had set. Luckily for me though; I'd brought the camera!

While Mike stayed near the car I headed down to the beach with my nikon D300 and tripod hoping to get at least a few photos in the limited time I had before Mike started whinging and his stella started calling him! I immediatley made for the wreck of the helvetica. While I had a few nice sunsets on disk that I'd taken a while back I didn't have any suitable sunset shots through the Helvetica ship wreck that I could use for selling as canvas prints.

It didn't take long to set up the camera and start shooting away low to the beach as the water raced towards me with the reflection of the sun dancing up to my toes. The low shots are my favourite kind of shots, I like the detail of the water and foam close up in photography and the depth of field that gives with headland in the distance. When Iam taking these kind of photographs part of me is also imagining the image being in its final form as a canvas print on a wall in someone's home or office, so its important to me that I get distance in the photograph. While I was snapping away there must of been a dozen or so other photographers all within about 15 - 20 feet of me marvelling also at the reflections and colours in the sky as the sun dropped and the light burst over the worm.

I took around 40 photographs and moved along the beach trying out different angles, once I had checked the camera that I was happy with the shoot I went back to the car to find Mike moaning that it was a friday night and we really should be in the pub!

The following day I was up early and editing the shots in photoshop, cropping and changing the colours to golds, sepias and bright oranges and reds. This may seem a little like overprocessing of the photograph with such heavy bold colours, but its purely intended to match interior colour schemes in its next stage as a box canvas print and that is mainly the reason that I add large sections of bold colour to most of my landscape photographs. These effects are created using the image adjustments tools in photoshop.

The next step was to size the photo to a 44" by 24" at 300dpi so it will wrap around the wooden 40" by 20" wooden frame to make a canvas print. It was then sent to my epson stylus pro 9600 wide format giclee printer and printed onto 280gsm high quality canvas.

The final print was then bubble wrapped and along with five or six other landscape canvases taken to the oyster gallery and hung on the wall for sale in time for the weekend shoppers in mumbles.