Landscape

El Prat

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A set of images from a walk from El Prat to Castelldefels, at the very edge of the Barcelona metropolitan area. I much prefer the beaches in winter, when the temperature is more bearable and there are fewer people. The walk is about 20km, with quite a lot on sand, necessitating an early start from the El Prat railway station. From there, there is a short walk through the town to start of the wet lands and dunes that surround the airport, which dominates everything not least for the constant […]

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Photography

Besòs

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A short set of images taken on a walk around the mouth of the River Besòs. This ought to be premium beach front in Barcelona, but a long history of industrial use means that much of it is a dramatic change from the pristine tourist beaches in Barceloneta and around Port Vell.

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Black and White

Stormy Times

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A short set of images taken along the seafront in Barcelona shortly after a storm had passed, These were shot with a Minolta X700 and a Tokina 28-70mm objective as part of some tests to select a lens for a future project. I bought the Tokina while a student, thirty years ago, and never really liked the image quality. Wide open it is just soft across the frame and without any real character – it needs to be stopped down to at least f8 to get decent results. Despite this, […]

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Landscape

Come Walk With Me…

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A short set of images taken around the piers in Brighton, during a rather stormy period. I have been meaning to try to take some pictures of the old piers for some time, although the original intention of making some long exposure sea-scapes was largely thwarted thanks to a slight aversion to the gale-force winds that were seemingly laced with sleet for much of the time…  

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Photography

Sitges – and Lens Cast Corrections in Capture One

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A short set of images taken on a walk in Sitges. Shot on digital using a 35mm lens and polarising filter.   Incidentally, the vignetting on some of these images is completely natural, although perhaps exaggerated slightly by the skies and polariser. The lens is a Zeiss ZM 1,4/35 (35mm f1.4), which is nice and small and incredibly sharp, but which pays for that to some extent with dark corners shot wide open – a common problem with Leica lenses shot on digital rather than film. Here is a gratuitous […]

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Abstract

Barceloneta Double Exposure

Double exposure on Barceloneta Beach, Barcelona
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Double exposure on HP5+, taken in-camera with the Minolta XDs at Barceloneta‘s San Sebastian beach. Maybe given the outcome of recent COP21 climate talks in Paris, there is a fair chance this is will not be an accurate representation of the area by 2200. After the 120 film frames, the 35mm seem awfully small and grainy…

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Photography

Barceloneta by Night

Night-time photograph along the beach front in Barceloneta. Taken with the Canon 5D Mark III and Sigma 35mm f1.4 Art.
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Just to completely break any consistency with the previous uploads, here is a set of colour images taken around 8pm along the beach-front from Barceloneta to Port Olímpic in Barcelona. The lighting here is an impossible mess of different colour temperatures. Setting white balance for anything realistic is almost impossible, so I have settled for something surrealistic. Curiously, the saturation is not boosted – the main edits in Lightroom are to drive up the contrast and add vignetting. I used the DSLR for these to avoid carrying a tripod. All the […]

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Photography

Daybreak

Barceloneta
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A few simple pictures taken early in the morning along the beach between Port Olimpic and Barceloneta. This is quite a good time of year to catch the transient morning light as it is no longer necessary to get up at 4am… Shot with the DSLR rather than film so that I could use a short-telephoto lens (here the excellent Canon 135mm f2). The lens gives a nice telephoto compression that seems to work well with the relatively empty shots, suiting the early morning tranquility. There are surprisingly few ape-descended life forms people at the beach at […]

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