They watch

This is a sculpture created for a Memorial Garden or Millenium Garden in Kilmore Quay, Co. Wexford, Ireland. The statue overlooks the Ballytiegue Bay, otherwise known as the graveyard of 1,000 ships. The statue depicts a mother, wife or partner looking out to sea being comforted. The memorial garden that it is adjacent to has engraved the names of hundreds of people who lost their lives at sea.

The image was exporeted from Lightroom to Photomatix as 3 bracketed images of +2,0,-2 Ev. Then they were finely balanced so as not to look like a HDR image. This then had a few sample presets applied before I settled on an infrared one. Then the orange and yellow saturation sliders were adjusted to reduce the orange effect. This was then exported to CS3 to remove noise, add a little subtle contrast and sharpen. Obviously this preset had a deep vignette too which I thought suited the atmosphere.

As ever the original image can be seen by clicking the image above.

The Pier

This is St Helens Bay in Wexford, Ireland. It draws you in...there's nothing spectacular there apart from a bay, a few rocks and a quaint little pier. But it can be a nice little place for images.

This image here was as a reesult of a failed "moon watch". I had seen a great moon the previous evening rising around 9.30pm so with another reasonably clear sky I went in search of the moon. The reason for this particular spot is that a couple of miles off land there is a lighthouse, Tuskar Lighthouse, so I was hoping for both in the one shot. Shooting a moon at night isn't what you'd call clever. You either get a blown moon, or a non-existent landscape. You live and learn.

Anyway, this image. I straightened the horizon and lost a few dust spots. Then I converted to B&W which was straight forward enough. I added a little contrast and burned in the edges of the steps. Then I got the curves layer and used the white eye dropper to find the brightest spot (with the "show clipping" box ticked). Then I added a gradient overlay for the top of the image. Well, not an overlay as such just added a black gradient and reduced the opacity until I was happy with it. I then copied this gradient and reversed it to cover the bottom but had to reduce it's height so as not to infringe too much on the image. Lastly an octave sharpening run with a reduced opacity. BUT, the work done had given me some noise so I ran a noise reduction bit of software over it to clean it. I didn't mask it as it looked OK without it. And voila.

The original image can be seen by clicking on the image above then hover your mouse over the button on my website.