If “one day” never came

I thought I’d share this shot with you today.

It’s special to me because it was the first time I got to go on a photoshoot with my Dad since moving to Australia in 2008.

It was always going to be a hard decision moving so far away from home to pursue a life-long dream of living in Oz, but I’d reached a bit of a dead end in my sleepy old home town in England and it really was time for a change.

But looking back now, just making that decision was the biggest hurdle. It would have been easy to procrastinate over it and keep saying “one day”, and if I had, one day would have never come.

And if one day never came, one thing would never have led to another, and I’d never be writing you this blog post, years later. And it all goes back to that one decision.

Family and friends were obviously the hardest things to leave behind, but it’s so easy to keep in contact online these days. I probably talk more to my parents now on Skype than I did when I lived just down the road from them.

So when my Dad made it over for a visit back in ’13 one of the things I HAD to tick off the list was to go shoot a sunrise together, so he could experience one of my favourite things about living here in Sydney.

This tidal swimming pool is about a 25 minute drive from home and the location (Coalcliff) marks the start of my favourite stretch of coastline for seascapes.

About the shot, composition-wise, the toughest thing was getting a wide enough angle that could fit the whole pool in whilst standing on the thin ledge. Even at 17mm, I couldn’t get the whole thing in, so I cut the corner off strategically.

The other main challenge was the processing because as always, there was such contrast between the dark areas and the bright sky when shooting towards the sunrise like this.

But I used my trusty workflow with some luminosity masking to blend the exposures and make the selective adjustments needed to bring out the detail in all the important areas.

I did break one “rule” by making the water in the pool a bit brighter than it “should” have been, but I thought it was worth it to bring out that detail on the steps and the pool floor.

One thing I’d change if I were processed this image again; I might reduce the brightness of the building on the far left of the frame.

It probably was one of the brightest things in the scene with the sun reflecting off it, but it’s brightness and position right there on the edge is a bit distracting.

Picking out objects based on their brightness and adjusting them selectively is exactly what my Luminosity Masking Mastery course teaches you.

(Click here to get it now)

Talk soon
Steve