30 December 2010

where my heart takes me....sunset at williamstown beach

been to williamstown beach a few times previously but could not seem to get the sunset i was after...till last Tuesday when we drove there with my sister and her baby... we must have arrived right on time, must have been 8:30 pm...when the colours in the sky have just started to change... the sun was going down, slowly and lovingly, like a deliberate display of its beauty....then, a feeling of calmness invades your soul as time passed by.

as we were going home, i felt my heart was full of thankfulness to Him for the simple pleasures in life...





























below is my sister with her baby as we arrived at the beach shortly before the sunset...



3 comments:

bmt (joealvero) said...

looking at this album makes me feel i'm partly there walking along the sand ~deja vu.

Chris said...

I like the one of the three silhouetted kids the best. It has a very clear point of interest, and the silhouettes look great against the water.
I think it could have been stronger if there was better separation between the subjects--the silhouette of the front two boys overlap, and there's a dark wave cutting through the girl as well as some darker sand.

Chris said...

You asked: "how do i make the sand not too dark, i.e. how do i make the other parts of the shot to have softer tones without reducing the contrast (as i needed it to create the silhouette?)"

That's a good question! I was thinking more about what I would have liked to have seen, and less about how you'd make that happen.

With such a high-contrast scene, I'm not sure there's anything you could do to lighten the other shadows. You could over-expose the image, so that there's detail in all of the shadows, then use a curve or the burn tool to darken just the silhouettes. But then you'd be loosing detail in the brightest parts of the sky and water because of the over-exposure.

I think the right answer would be to learn how to recognize what areas of the scene are going to come out completely dark, and to carefully compose the image so that there is separation and good space around the subjects. Not an easy feat, especially with such a fleating moment!

It's interesting to think about, though, how when working with such a high-contrast scene, parts of the image may turn into solid black shapes that have a much different role in the composition than they did when you were looking at the scene with your naked eye.

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