Sea Front

Firstly - Happy New Year.

The picture below is an old one, I took it several years ago when I used to live in Brighton, a great place for photographic opportunities. The sun was setting over the beach huts and there was a really nice cloud formation so just snapped this shot. I have altered a few things in the picture but not a great deal, played with the Curves and Levels a bit just to add a bit of a contrast between the clouds and the sky as on the original they blended together a bit.

Brighton was a great place to live and presented lots of areas for pictures, I have recently been going through all my pictures from my Brighton days and pulling out a few that have potential to become decent pictures, some of them sit in my "work in progress" folder for a long time until I work out what I want to do with them, some pictures you can look at and know how to make them great, others are slow burners. This one was a slow burner and in the end I didn't really need to do much to it to get something I liked.

Lake Superior

I recently travelled to Minneapolis on a work trip and took the oppotunity to go and visit Lake Superior with my girlfriend and some work colleagues. Essentially its just a big lake, but in the same way Big Ben is just a big clock, if you are a foreigner seeing these things is really cool. It's the worlds biggest lake (if you don't count the Caspian Sea and treat Michigan and Huron as separate lakes, although technically they are one) and going to see it was awesome. One of those things you can tick off the list of places to visit.

The weather on the day was freezing cold as it was approaching winter and winters in Duluth are harsh. But the weather just seemed to make the place feel more rugged and frontier like. The lighthouse stands at the entrance to the harbour in Duluth and the image of the building standing there alone against all that the wild frontier could throw at it was an inspiration.

The other picture is of a ship leaving the harbour, we were walking back to the car and heard the sirens that go off just before the bridge in front of the harbour is raised to let a ship in or out. The Algolake is a huge vessel that transports cargo all around the ports spread throughout the various great lakes.

Landscapes

The following two pictures are a couple of my favourite landscape pictures so far. The first was from a trip around the northern parts of Argentina, the salt flats are an incredible place stretching as far as the eye can see in one direction and right up to the Andes in the other. It was a bleak desolate place but beautiful. The second picture is of Stonehenge, it was a cold winters day, very cold indeed so there was no one around. The angle against the skyline made turning it into a silhouette ideal.

Photography

I have decided to turn this Blog into a way of recording my photographic hobby. I have always enjoyed taking pictures for no other reason than I like to.... they are for me, if others like them then great, if they don't... well never mind. So here we go, the first picture.

My other interest is bodyboarding, I like to travel to various spots in the UK in my old trusty VW Camper and get in the sea. Its not just the sport I enjoy but the whole surf culture/lifestyle. I realise that its bit of a cliche these days and not the hippie world of the 60's, but its there and the people that truly understand know who they are. This was a picture I took on the beach in Newquay, not one of my favourite spots due to the crowds but you can't deny that when its pumping in Newquay its a great place to surf. I was walking along the beach with my camera and saw these two guys walking along the beach looking for a spot and it just seemed to give a glint of what surfing is to me, two friends going to enjoy the waves...