Personal photography
I’ve taken a lot of lighthouses in my years because I find their idea insane: build a structure in the most inhospitable places, put a few guards in it, and make them keep the light on. It’s crazy.
This insanity made me go round a lot of the Scottish East coast lighthouses to photograph them.
I took this picture in October 2006 in Findhorn, Scotland (see previous posts to see more photos from that spot).
Last week I visited the lighthouse at Cordouan, on the French Atlantic coast, not far from where I live. It’s one of those things that aren’t far, but as a local you don’t do (e.g. when I grew up in Paris it took me many years to visit the Eiffel tower the first time even though I saw it nearly every day).
I took this photo in 2008 with my 5D. I was on my way to the West coast of Scotland with a friend of mine (in the photo next to the monument) and we stopped on the way when I saw this monument away from the road on top of a hill. We walked to it and took some photos.
I remember it had a long list of names on a plaque, so I’m assuming it was a war monument, but I now can’t remember exactly what it said.
When I lived in Scotland, I’d spend a lot of my weekends across the country on the West Coast. Especially in the winter. The scenery is spectacular there, and very sparsely populated.
Sometimes, you take a photo not because it’s well composed, but because its meaning strikes you.
When I was in Oslo early June, I tried to spend as much time as possible in the streets taking photos. For me, as I was there for work, it meant mainly in the morning on my way to the office. Which was good: the light was great. High enough to go between buildings, but not above them.
I won’t only show what I think are good photos here. It’s worth discussing failures as well, and it’s important to be honest. Here is such a failure.
This is one of the first monochrome photos I made back in 2006. It was taken at Dunnottar, a fortress on a rock in Northern Scotland. I wanted to learn digital monochrome at a time when it wasn’t that common (or it was just desaturation and super flat).
This is another seashore photo from Northern Scotland. It was taken in 2006 with a Canon 350D (I know, archaic) + Canon 17-55IS.
This time the subjects are the boats around the centre of the frame. Boats always make an interesting scene because they evoque the sound and smell of the sea, the stillness of the water (this isn’t a long exposure), and they have interesting symmetry due to their reflections.
To make sure that the boats are obviously the subject and to make the shot a bit more interesting, I placed myself where the top of the wooden ladder on the pier framed the boats, left and right.
I also tried to make the background shore and the stone pier frame these same boats, top and bottom.
Finally, I tried to put the shore line, the pier, and the ladder legs on third lines to balance the frame.
To balance the brightness and colour of the sky and the sea, I used a light ND grad.
I would have preferred to have the boats a bit more centred. But if I moved up, I lost the framing of the ladder, and if I changed the angle I lost the pier in the foreground.
In terms of processing, I didn’t do much apart from readjusting the levels a little bit.
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