The Jellyfish Road

The Jellyfish Road, originally uploaded by Bexley98.

Quite a productive weekend with the camera. As mentioned in a post last week, I always try to set myself a goal when I go out to take photos. Based on the last weeks (excellent) TWIP podcast, I decided to take more pictures portrait style rather than landscape style.

As someone who takes a lot of landscapes, this was surprisingly difficult and posed some interesting compositional challenges. Fortunately, the constantly changing Nairn seascape came to my rescue with 1000’s of beached Jellyfish, stretched in a long line across the beach. When the tide goes out in Nairn it really goes out, opening up about a mile of desert-like beach and these fellas were sitting about halfway down the beach.

I assume they were dead? They aren’t exactly the most mobile of creatures….not sure if they go dormant and wait for the tide again? Anyway, it made the walk along the beach quite surreal and from a photographic point of view an ideal opportunity to shoot a landscape style picture in a portrait format. The result is above and I’m really pleased with it.

As per most of my recent pictures, it’s a HDR but I was very gentle with the tone mapping, just bring the contrast up and trying to highlight the brilliant colours of the Jellyfish. I took a load of close-ups of the prettier ones, they look a bit like flat marbles, with the swirl of colour through the middle. I’m working on some kind of montage of these and will post shortly.

I’ve not managed to be on Culbin beach at low tide before, and it’s a hugely atmospheric place, the challenge is adding some foreground interest when surrounded by so much…nothing. The only thing to break up the otherwise empty landscape are these posts…possibly the remnants of an old pier or something…you can see my efforts here and here.

In other news, I continue to develop a love of my new Lightroom>Photoshop workflow, rather than Olympus Master>(several crashes)>Picasa>Photoshop….as someone who only shoots several hundred shots a week rather than a pro who might shoot several thousand, Lightroom really does the job, I think I’ll wait until Lightroom v2 comes out, which looks even better.

Lightrooms ability to process several tasks at once (like exposing the same RAW 6 times for a HDR image) yet still allowing you to continue working is a Godsend, I’m still getting my head around catalogues and whether I really need them but aside from this and a few minor niggles it’s great.

Finally, I’m getting increasingly annoyed with the bad-press that HDR’s seem to be getting…I’ll rant about that this week at some point and also I hope to have another trip out with the camera on Thursday or Friday this week, so hopefully some more eye-candy then.