Beach Huts

Excellent vibrance, symmetry and dynamism, cracking shot

Great use of long exposure, very creative. Not many of us would think of this but it's the only way that sky could have been rendered like this.

Regards
David

Very effective. It would also make a good square crop without the buildings either side and with the plank cloned out.

I agree with Andrew.It could work even better

absolutely cool travel photography - this looks amazing

Yes I agree I think it work better.

I do like this.

I too think it would look better without the huts on the sides, although I actually like the plank (I assume you do too or else you'd have removed it before taking the shot). I can see the problem. If you square crop you lose a good deal of that magnificent great sky (the whole point of the long exposure). Could you have got closer perhaps with an even wider angle? Easy to think of with hindsight. I see you're already down to 11mm.

Out of interest, I assume you used a ND density filter. What did you use? A 10 stopper perhaps? If you used the old Hi-tech with the blue cast you've managed to recover a reasonable colour balance - often people give up and convert to B&W!

Great colours and details. Nicely done.

Hi all

Thanks as ever for comments and suggestions... very much appreciated...

Interesting, this...

Tbh, I chose to take a picture of this beach hut BECAUSE of what surrounded it...
I took a lot of pictures of beach huts that afternoon, many of them on their own...
but it was the huts either side and the log foreground that particularly interested me about this one... for me, the (duller, more dilipidated) huts either side provide the context for the brighter colours of the central hut, and the log's a reminder of what the central hut once was, and might one day become... as well as providing a leading line to the central hut and a foreground echo of the converging cloud streaks in the background... as well as being just a bit random, which I also rather like...

So cropping might well improve the aesthetics of the photograph, but (for me) makes a less interesting story...

Re removing the log, I tend not to clone things like this out of my pictures (see link), and tbh I also generally tend not to move them... I generally take pictures of what I see, almost always as I find it...

Re the long exposure, this was taken with a B&W 10 stop (it was mid afternoon in feb I think)... I also have a B&W 6 stop... I really like the B&W's although they do tend to leave a slight magenta cast (less noticeable in brighter light, as here)... I've tried the (new) hi tech pro stopper 10 stop and just don't get along with it (find the blue colour cast is nigh on impossible to remove)... I finally managed to get my hands on the Lee Big Stopper 10 stop a couple of months ago, which I haven't used much as yet, but is probably the easiest of the lot to remove colour cast-wise, and is tremendous picture quality wise... not cheap mind...

Best

Hi Bill

On reflection I think you're right and the huts either side help frame it. You seem to have applied some vignetting to tone them down, which I think helps. In fact, the more I look at it, the more I like it!

I've got the Hi Tech 10 stop with the infamous blue cast. In spite of them claiming the cast is easy to eliminate I read somewhere that they have bowed to customer demand and released a more neutral 10 stop filter. I rarely get the opportunity to use the 10 stopper but I recently experimented to see how well it would colour balance. I used a QPcard 203 to derive camera profiles for Adobe Camera Raw, with and without the filter. I then took shots with and without the filter and processed in ACR, applying the appropriate camera profiles. Using the unfiltered shot as a reference I was able to tweak the white balance sliders in ACR and obtain a pretty close match between the filtered and unfiltered shots (to my eye at least). When I next use it in anger I'll upload shots with and without the filter for comparison.

Nice color and nice back ground.
Regards

I think the huts either side help to make the location very clear! Just seems silly to me to remove the principal hut from its environment. Purely personal opinion you understand.
Love the shot incidentally!

Great stuff, waypointcharlie... Congrats on getting the Hi Tech to work for you... I never quite got the measure of colour balancing myself... Too impatient and tried (and failed) to do it all in post... I've read plenty of gd stuff though about it... Robert Strachan in particular wrote a blog about it (the new pro stopper version) and was very complimentary...

Btw, the vignetting you've spotted is actually a byproduct of using the B&W on the Sigma 10 20 (one of the reasons I had a look at the Lee Big Stopper)... I could probably have removed it in post, but on this occasion I quite liked it...

Best