h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

As my week off rounds of to a close, I set off to the coast with the intent of doing some self portraits on golden sands (my online profiles are in serious need of updating); maybe some long exposures of gentle waves breaking over rocks, to hang up around the flat.

This was not to be.

I arrived at Southwold, on the Suffolk Coast, with the sea crashing against the pier in spectacular, pounding, waves, the weather growing steadily worse and just out to sea a large front was visible. In the centre the rain was coming down as an obscuring mist. I'd timed my arrival with the hope of seeing the tide come in, but behind the tide was a storm accelerating the sea forward up the beach!

The wind went from blustery to buffeting on a whim, rain fell cold and hard like nails, and the clouds rolled into toward the coast promising worse to come.

Today, as it turned out, was a good day to be out with the camera!

Despite my best efforts on so many of the photos I got spray and blobs of water on the lens!! *sob* , so I've rescued what I can.

Also, I'd gone with ambitions of hunting down the converging lines to attract the eye. However with the sea rapidly advancing up the beach I had abandon this plan and make a swift retreat for the safety of the sea wall - and so from then on was confined to taking my photos from various man-made vantage points - and not low to the ground where I could get some nice angles, seeing as low to the ground was now under-water.

I hadn't done any HDR and my long exposures were minorly successful but nothing special - so as I sat diddling about in photoshop wondering what I could do to make the images sing - I decided to try something different and apply textures to the photos: I began liking the results and figured it works by complementing the rather chaotic , and non-uniform nature of the waves by giving each image a different sense of character or story.


But do tell me what you think.



http://www.flickr.com/photos/richardhealy450d/sets/72157630020986559/

Ahhh, proper Suffolk Weather! The coast there I always like the best when its stormy....

hoo ooh nice one clive

I like the breaking wave in "Message in a Bottle". And the postcard is interesting.

TRiG.

Thank you friends!

2legs - yeah I'd hoped to make more of the beach - but timing and the weather were rather conspiring against me!

Jackruss - Thank ye kindly.

TRiG - That's the one that has had the most work done to it, oddly.

I've *added* lens distortion and vignettes (I wanted that wave to be almost leaping off the screen) it's also got a huge contrast bump and a rather aggressive high pass filter on it, then the written manuscript blended in using a gradient filter layer.

This is my first attempt at using textures in photographs. I think it lends something to these images which if I left it out, would then be lacking. In other words it's not gratuitous. I'd be interested in experimenting more with textures, perhaps doing some more subtle things with them. F'rinstance I downloaded some very interesting spider-web textures yesterday which are sure to come in useful at Halloween!

I do trust you found time, to pop into a local hostaliary whilst there, and partake in a pint or two of Adnams

I guess using the textures, to in affect make up for the shortcomings of the weather being so bad it was making taking the photos as you wanted, is justified.... Mind, of course, all this messing about with photos with photoshop and the like is something I've not seen as it wasn't really done in the way back when
Oo... audio recordings of the big storms on the coast would be kinda cool...

I know my Brother, who's now got a flat on the top of the cliff, overlooking the sea, and the big wind turbine, just off ness point (Lowestoft most easterly point in Britten/UK), says watching the storms, especially those far* out to see, that don't necessarily hit the coast itself, is pretty spectular, especially with the lightening and stuff going off, way out to see...

A new upload!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/richardhealy450d/7168614203/in/set-72157630020986559/lightbox/

I call this one "A Dunwich Horror" - Dunwich, so I gather, is a Saxon village all but completely now lost to the sea just a little way further up the coast from Southwold.

In now way that I am aware of is it connected to the Lovecraftian tentacular horror of eldritch malevolant powers set around Maine , however the association was too good to pass up.

A tonne of post-processing went into this photo.

Levels and contrast were edited, some brightness and colour changes, there's a greatly attenuated radial blur in there (i wanted to give it a sense of 'punch' pushing out at you. My usual high pass filter (duplicate > overlay> high pass filter > soft or hard light) ; I've then blended it with a texture of a rusting dumpster (which is where all those fantasting swirls come from!) that's been monochromed, stretched, twisted and had it's levels altered to get greater contrast. I thought it needed a little something more on top of all of that so I've thrown in some 'glowing edges' for that extra 'other-worldy' 'pop'

Ta-da!

I did go to a pub - didn;t have the adnams, but a local ale called "ghost ship".

Sometimes I like to try to capture the reality of a scene - however this kind of shoot, while not intended to make up for the bad weather - does rather lend itself to being digitally post-processed, and I'm not adverse to that.

Maybe I can ask your brother if I can come visit and get a view of those storms - that would be fan-dabby-dozy!

It demonstrates how much the coast round there has changed, over the centuarys, Dunwich (the old bit now gone), was* the most Easterly part of the country, at some point... There's a whole host of folk tales, round the area, that your meant to be able to hear the Church bells, from the thirty or more Churches now under the sea, when its low tide... That bit of the coast is often very fruitful for fossil hunting, after storms, as the cliff being exposed, is many tens of miles from the origional coastline, and it just keeps moving back and back inward... A lot of ghost stories too, round taht area of the coast, due to all the shipwrecks and suchlike... many of the (what we now regard as villages), in such areas on the coast, were once very large settlements, often obliterated by the plague, at various times...