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Shooting Diary | St Monans | 29th July 2012

Written on Monday, July 30, 2012
Last updated on Tuesday, July 31, 2012

This trip nearly didn't happen. Coming on the back of the recent outing to Seton Sands I wasn't really expecting Ross "Can't" Scott to be up for a repeat so soon. Sure enough he wasn't, but a quick reminder of what he said while shooting on the previous trip...

"Is this not the greatest hobby in the world? Out the house, beautiful landscapes and fresh air!" 

His own wisdom changed his mind and the Peco & Peel travelling photography circus was on another mission! This time St. Monans (or St. Monance if you prefer). And Peco was driving \o/

As regular readers may know I've been to St. Monans before so knew pretty much what to expect. Although the tide was coming in, it wasn't nearly as high as I thought it might be. In hindsight I've no idea what the tide was at the last time but this trip it was definitely lower, this time you could see the base of the wall in the water. Hell it was so calm we even walked out on the thing to shoot back towards the village itself. See Ominous St Monans >> .

I don't think my wall shots for this trip are as nice as the last one, I preferred the colour and conditions then but we did get an great find after the sun had set. As soon as I saw it I new I'd seen photographs of it before - a quick look at my flickr favourites shows a shot from Shahbaz Majeed. At the time I had no idea where it was, just that the rocks looked really interesting and that I wanted to go. I'm really glad to find them and will definitely be back here to pointedly ignore the wiggly wall and instead shoot the awesome rocks.

Partly my interest is in the geology and how such amazing looking rocks are created - I'm not any sort of knowledgeable type on this subject but I do find it endlessly interesting - not so much the rocks themselves as how time changes them. My guess is the spiky rocks are laid down in water over millions of years then later the land becomes buckled, bent and tilted to the angle we see today. As I said though, I know nothing. More knowledgeable types have written some information here.

My 3 shots of this didn't really do the place justice but at least I know where it is now and I shall be back. Razerback #1 >> , Razerback #2 >> and Razerback #3 >>

Post Processing for Razerback #2 >>

I haven't buggered with the white balance - camera is set to Auto WB - and this colouring is what it thought was correct! If anything I've actually toned down the colour! As it goes, I like it this way.

This shot, should come as no surprise, is an image averaged shot. It's made up of 10x 15s exposures with a 25s delay giving a long exposure grand total of 3m 45s. The large delay was no problem this time as the moving clouds where near the horizon, meaning that the apparent motion is reduced. Also the individual exposures where quite long themselves. This helps the blending together of movement. 

I did two passes of the RAW files to get the sky and foreground (0EV f/g, -0.9EV sky). This meant two goes at the image averaging then blending the two IA frames together much as I do on my DRI workflow. I spent and age trying to get the horizon/jaggy rocks correctly blended with the sky- at the time of writing it's still not right but I do intend working on it again.

Next up I took the last shot of the 10 frames loaded into a layer. I then masked it all out except the moon - in the long exposure it'd blurred quite a lot with it's movement so using the single frame allowed me to correct it.

Next I used the Lens Correction tool to correct the vertical perspective - the wee lump of concrete with the metal pole in it (no it's not Excalibur) had a massive lean going on and instead of simply cloning it out I decided to correct the verticals.

I then added a Vibrance layer and lowered the saturation of the image by -25

Finally I sharpened (which I've overdone slightly to judge by the jaggies at the right) and slapped on my watermark

.:. FIN .:. 

 

All the images taken on this trip: -

July 2012, St Monans

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