This week has been a strange one. With few genuine opportunities to use the big camera it was left mostly to the wee Sony and the phone. After recently upgrading to the Samsung Galaxy S8 from the S6 I had made a promise to try and make use of the camera and the available apps to try and be more creative with it.
I started with the Sony on a late/night shift where I had around 20 mins break in a rail yard on the Ayrshire coast. The weather had be typically horrendous just as the kids finished up for summer up here, so at 11pm it was unseasonably dark in the yard. I played with a few hand held long exposures to use the lines of the horizon, sea and land to make some ICM (intentional camera movement) images.
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Rail yards nowadays are rarely well maintained, well freight ones in this area at least have loads of vegetation growing near and sometimes on the tracks. With a fresh breeze coming off the sea the long grasses popping through the sleepers and ballast were waving around and so I tried to use the light from my locomotive to give them a little highlight within this dark setting. I tried to use the brightness of the clouds in contrast with the dark vegetation with the highlights of the blowing grasses to dance in the foreground.
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All this darkness had got me think and craving something creative. I started thinking about multiple exposures and how I’ve never really got to grips with them in camera. I’ve tried on a few occasions and get the practical side of in camera ME but I began to wonder if the Nikon D810 restricted me a little and maybe I should’t be so reluctant to use software post shoot. So I began to capture little details from around my workplace throughout the week mainly with my phone and downloaded the Photoshop Mix app to have a play on my down time.
Feeling slightly aimless I decided to go in search of some help online. Usually most information can be found on the internet and quite often Youtube where you can almost find anything to do with photography. But I found it hard to find anything tangible about Landscape Multiple exposure, loads about portrait ME but very little to do with creative landscape work.
I then went on Doug Chinnery’s website. I have been on a few workshops with Doug and he has helped me enormously with many aspects of photography, he’s also a true gent and would help anyone if he can. His work oozes creativity, stirring emotion and intrigue with every image. He also provides online tutorials which run live and also available to download afterwards. Well I found one that I thought would be of interest to me ‘Working Creatively with Textures in Photoshop’, which you can find HERE along with his other available downloads.
This seemed to do the trick. Not that I wasn’t familiar with layers etc in PS but I needed some reassurance I was on the right tracks and what I imagined would be the way to add texture and tone to an image in PS wasn’t too far from the truth. It set me on a route to have a proper go and play with the images I had captured at work to try and create an image that I felt shared the feeling of working outside through the night.
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I used these three images all in the same format all captured with my Samsung S8 over the week to create this image below.
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I did have one shot with the nikons on the Sunday, when travelling back from work in Edinburgh, something I will probably be doing more often due to changing circumstances at work. So I have been sourcing out some alternative routes that maybe I can use to my advantage when conditions are right at different times of the year.
So I noted a few locations travelling along the back roads on one scenic route, stopping at a viewpoint I’ve seen before and hopefully I’ll get proper light to help bring it to life one day. for now though I took an IR and colour shot with the Nikons for future reference.
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Well thank you again for reading #MyOrdinaryWeek blog and hope you found something of interest in it. If you liked it then I do hope you will join me again next week as I try to share my thoughts and ideas.
Until next time………
