I took this picture in October 2006 in Findhorn, Scotland (see previous posts to see more photos from that spot).
The reason I took it is that it evocated my 70s childhood big time. Those who grew up after the 70s probably won’t understand, but this image is typical 70s. Everything in it evoques a 70s childhood for me:
The colours are from a 70s summer. I don’t know why, but the 70s had super yellow summers (it could be in retrospect because of the way 70s photos aged). The sunset at the time of the photo recreated that. I didn’t change the colours. I didn’t even increase saturation out of the camera’s raw file. I barely processed this photo beyond removing dust marks in the sky (the joy of the 5D). With the light mist created by the evaporation on that warm evening, this is so 70s for me.
I shot toward the sun to get light reflections on the bicycles. I didn’t want them to be in the shadows. They had to shine and be yellow. So I put the sun just outside the frame on the right to avoid lens flare and have the light rays at nearly 90 degrees of the bikes.
The bikes are also typical 70s childhood. We didn’t have video games, the internet, and in some cases even a landline phone (too expensive to be allowed to use it in Europe). So we went out to play. And our Boomer parents weren’t GenZ’s over-protecting parents. They just didn’t care. As long as you were back for dinner time, you were on your own. So we went far and for a long time. As kids, the only way we could do that was on bicycles.
To take the photo, I put the horizon roughly on a third line. That allowed me to put a wheel of the foreground bicycle on a third intersection as an anchor point in the picture.
One of the things that attracted me was that red bag on the ground. It was contrasting nicely with the grass and was a good starting point to the exploration of the picture. With the edge of the sea acting as a guide, the eye goes from the red bag to the foreground bicycle to the group of bicycles to the small tower in the background. Finally, the eye comes back through the boats to the jetty and ends there.
Finally, the sea was forming a nice triangle with the shore and the horizon, and the brain loves triangles. So it was the perfect spot to take that photo.
One of things I’m not happy about is the stone jetty on the left that seems out of place because it has no part in the story. But it was there and I didn’t find an angle that would give me the bicycles and that light without it or I was losing the sea or the sun.
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