Milford-on-Sea

On Monday, I had the chance to visit the beach at Milford-on-Sea, Hampshire. I've never been there before, but as we were passing the area, I persuaded my husband to stop there for a quick walk! I had my camera with me, but no tripod.

It was a bit early in the day for photographs - it was mid-afternoon, and the light was quite harsh. Nevertheless, I took several shots, with one of the future OCA assignments in mind, and managed to get a few that I was quite pleased with.

When I got back to the car, I was upset to discover that I'd had the camera set to low quality jpegs instead of RAW - what a silly mistake! My husband could see that I was upset, and offered to take my daughter for a quick walk whilst I popped back to the beach to take a few more. I quickly returned to the spot I had found earlier, and was pleased to find that the sun had started to set, casting a beautiful soft, warm light over the water. Knowing I only had about ten minutes, I took several shots handheld, manually bracketing some of the exposures in case I wanted to create exposure-blended images later. Usually, I would have used a slow shutter speed to blur the water, but with no tripod, I was forced to use fast shutter speeds.

The image at the top of this entry is my favourite of the dozen or so that I took. It has been created from five bracketed exposures, blended using the 'dynamic range increase'(DRI) option in Photomatix. I carried out more Photoshop processing than I would usually, in order to try and recreate the beautiful light that I witnessed in person.

Here is one of the original, unedited exposures - the middle of the five bracketed shots - followed by the edited version again, for comparison:

My first task was to get rid of the severe vignetting, caused by using a polariser on top of a sky filter (my battered old 18-200mm lens has a number of problems, one of which is that the sky filter is no longer removable. It's jammed tightly on to the lens!). I then corrected some barrel distortion and straightened the horizon slightly.

The next task was to remove the pronounced chromatic aberration that had been enhanced by the DRI process. I tried using Photoshop's 'lens distortion' correction filter, but this shifted the whole image, whereas the chromatic aberration only affected the foreground rocks a pebbles. I therefore created a duplicate layer, decreased the red, green and cyan saturation to zero on the background, and used a soft-edged eraser at 50% opacity to partially 'paint out' the worst affected areas. This took a while, as it involved some precision, but it worked well. 

I did not need to alter the Levels at all, as the DRI process had produced a nice balance of tones. However, I increased the vibrance slightly, and also applied a Noise Ninja filter to the sky. I then opened up the 'Curves' adjustment screen. This is something I've never used before - I've found it a bit daunting. However, having read a recent magazine article about the basics of Curve adjustment, I decided to have a go.

I was impressed by the effects that just slight changes can have. In particular, I created a gentle 'S' curve in the red channel, which gave a subtle warmth to the image. Using Curves, I managed to recreate the beautiful golden light as well as I could.



Shooting without a tripod and having only a very limited time in which to do so meant that I had returned home with a set of images that I was not particularly content with. However, thanks to Photomatix and Photoshop, I have managed to process this one image in such a way that I feel it was more than worth the dash back to the beach. I think this may be my new favourite image in my portfolio. It's not perfect - the composition could be better, and half an hour later, the light would have been even more photogenic, but all things considered, I feel quite proud of it. :)