Sanctuary

Welcome to the first post on my Blog. I have to start somewhere on this journey of teaching and learning - so here goes....

Sanctuary

The old Swanage pier, Swanage, Dorset on the South coast of England, UK. A popular site for photographers and clearly a view that has been taken over and over...

Taken with a Nikon D700 DSLR & Nikkor 24-70mm lens at 40mm, f11 71.0secs ISO200 held steady on a Gitzo systematic tripod. This was a stark cloudy though bright day with poor light for colour photography at the end of January 2012 early on a Sunday morning. Lee filters allowed me to delay the exposure with a 10stop Neutral Density filter (the "Big Stopper") whilst a hard graduated 0.9ND Lee filter held back the sky to give some definition to the clouds.

Whilst I have had my camera for just over three years I could barely transfer my images to the desktop from my camera up until 18 months ago. Fast forward to now and I have spent the last 18 months learning workflow with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (now version 3.6) and more recently have purchased the plug-in Silver Efex Pro 2. Other than some spots removed from the original RAW file and conversion to Black and White there is little here that has been altered.

What are the learning points for me here:

• When the weather is bad all is not lost
• I have a long way to go in learning about software and plug ins (but I'm enjoying the journey)

Feel free to leave a comment +/- teach! Thank you for visiting my blog.