On the Beach

To begin with, I would first like to say a happy new year to everyone, I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas break.

Ours was eventful, to say the least, with my wife spending a week in the hospital, but she is home now and on the mend.

But moving on…

So, I have recently undertaken a new project titled ‘On the Beach’ where I am exploring different ways to capture beach scenes and things that can be found on beaches. I have used some of these images on my socials and in the blog title “I walked right past it.” Capturing images on the beach seemed like a good idea in October and November when the weather was fine but since then…

Well, the weather has had other ideas. With temperatures getting more than 5 below 0 just before Christmas and a LOT of other things coming up, including Christmas itself, I sort of put this project on the back burner. But the wife, in her ever-loving wisdom, knows how to get me motivated, so today (6 Jan) we went to Barmouth, which is one of the beaches I had on my list for this project, but you know excuses.

While there I tried out a new technique, well actually it’s a very old technique, just one that I have never tried before. Using a yellow filter over the camera lens to block out some of the blue light getting to the sensor. This technique gives more definition to things in images like clouds when the image will be produced in black and white.

The weather at Barmouth was cloudy and rainy which provided a great opportunity to try out this technique, the tide was also low which was great for capturing some of the boats on the sand.

I took two images using the same camera settings, one with the yellow filter and one without. Here I have the before and after B&W of the two images.

Personally, I don’t see much difference in the clouds (this may be due to the movement of the clouds) but there is a slight difference in the sand.

But this is only a quick edit, the outcomes may be different when I can take more time to work on the images.