Photographic Bronze Order of Merit - started as a reject!
East Preston Beach
Low Tide Detail, West Sussex, 2020
I don’t often get recognition for my pictures. I keep trying. I keep trying Instagram, Facebook and other Social media Sites. In fact this image above is an image that I shot a couple of weeks ago and very nearly didn’t retouch or edit. I knew I had taken a couple of pictures and maybe it was because I forgot the sunshade for my iPad and couldn’t see it properly or maybe I just didn’t think much of it, I don’t know. It felt like one of those images that just wouldn’t work. So it has stayed in the “stills” folder in the video project which can be found here.
I sometimes post my pictures on The Grey Arrows forum for people who fly drones. Its a very useful forum. Its there I can find out the state of the UAV(unmanned aerial vehicles) industry and all the latest machinations of Drone ownership, registration the CAA and qualification.
So anyway, there are some very good folk on there who take some beautiful imagery and are happy to share their work and so I also put some of my shots up there.
Great Arrows Drone Forum announcement
So imagine my surprise when I get an email notification from the forum saying that my image that could/should have ended up on the cutting room floor was actually being awarded the Bronze order of Merit!
The picture itself is one that on first glance doesn’t have a great deal going for it, its flat, its not got a great deal of colour and I couldn’t get high enough, 400ft above ground level is my limit, to get the whole sand-bar in the shot.
I could have shot a panorama image but I was busy concentrating on video. Sometimes it’s best just to do one discipline or the other. Perhaps I can only do that, as I am getting too old to concentrate on more than one thing at a time!! Whilst I was primarily concentrating on shapes this was the best I could do at the time.
The original image, you can understand why I was going to abandon it!
Anyway this morning there must have been something in my coffee! I opened the image up, stared at it for a minute and challenged myself to do something with it. I think it was Ansel Adams that said that if colour wasn’t adding anything to your image make it black and white. So I explored the saturation sliders and figured the midtones of the sea could help to set off the stoney sand-bar. I used Lightroom and Photoshop to create the image.
Let me know in the comments if you would like me to create an instructional video of how I retouched this image. I will also offer it as a download for you to follow along.