STORM CLOUDS, SUNRISE and SILHOUETTES

Well it's a day later than I like to publish but sometimes other things just have to come first.

It never ceases to amaze me how people love to take pictures of the sun. Be that sunrise, sunsets or for me the sun shining through storm clouds and it amazes me even more the feedback photographers get from having taken them.

I certainly like taking the pictures, I think you can get some stunning effects with the sun in the right place even though you sometimes have to play with the exposures the point where your family has got bored and wandered off into the distance.

The joy of the modern camera phone is that it's possible to get very good shots without having to lug your dSLR around with you so I wanted to share a couple taken with my Pentax and a couple taken with my Samsung Galaxy S2.

These first two are taken in Cardiff Bay, Wales and are from the 'mobile' set on my Flickr site taken on my Samsung Galaxy S2.

For me the low sun on both of them gives the opportunity for some nice silhouettes. I liked the sun coming through the light fitment on the top of the lightship and on the other, I was keen to capture the silhouettes of the tree, church and cranes in the background. Neither of these shots used any special settings and were just taken 'point and shoot'.

This shot taken on Brighton Beach, Sussex one overcast and stormy afternoon was the last of a number of images I took in manual mode trying to get the balance between the contrast of the bright sun and dark clouds.

And finally ... this one has been around before and featured in my blog of 11th January based on around Clevedon.

I'd be really interested if anybody has any advice or guidance for me on taking this type of image I'd be really grateful for your feedback.

Sweet Shot Tuesday 1801 - Clevedon Pier

Firstly I'd just like to thank everybody for the phenomenal response to my SST image last week and all the kind comments I received. I have been wondering how I would ever match the feedback I received and I have decided not to even try to. I will just show the work I have created and hope it captures the imagination.

Most of my SST posts recently seem to have been based around the North Somerset seaside town of Clevedon and this week is no exception. The weather was blowing true to form and it the day was grey and overcast with bouts of heavy rain. Visitors to the sea front were few and far between and I wanted to capture an image that somehow reflected the weather and the lack of souls out by the sea.

This image of Clevedon Pier shows the flags at full stretch and maybe half a dozen people braving the wind to take a stroll out along its length.

I liked the idea of having a little colour in an otherwise grey picture which would help to portray the greyness of the day. To achieve this I used GIMP to select the chap in the red jacket and performed an inverse selection enabling me to de-saturate the remainder of the image. To bring out the features I added a little sharpen to help high-light the detail. Finally, in order to make the Pier closer to the foreground, and to get rid of the bins and the scaffold on the right I cropped the image with the result as below.

I played with various textures and graininess but I decided that there was so much to see in the Victoria superstructure I would have been a shame to hide the detail.

Camera: Panasonic
Model: DMC-FZ8
ISO: 200
Exposure: 1/50 sec
Aperture: 7.1
Focal Length: 11.2mm

Sweet Shot Tuesday 1101

When I went to Clevedon in North Somerset I was fully expecting to take some shots of a wild and windy afternoon. By the time I was in position the skies had cleared and the sun was peeking through. This is one of the shots I took that afternoon.

Camera: Panasonic
Model: DMC-FZ8
ISO: 100
Exposure: 1/250 sec
Aperture: 7.1
Focal Length: 6mm