Water under the bridge

Monday’s get a bad rap don’t they?

I used to hate Mondays.

But I look at them a little more optimistically these days.

A brand new week ready and waiting for us to wrestle it into submission.

Last week is water under the bridge. There’s nothing we can do to change it.

If it was bad, find the lesson in there and learn from it.

If it was good, celebrate it. ENJOY it!

But still learn from it…

And ask yourself “how can I make this week even better than last?”.

Speaking of water under the bridge…

Here’s a shot I took of some actual water under an actual bridge 🙂

Seacliff bridge to be precise, just south of Sydney. The popular choice is to shoot it from above, but it makes an interesting picture from down below too.

What I want to share most about this shot is how I used multiple exposures to create it – but not in the regular way.

You’ve seen me talk a lot about blending bracketed exposures with luminosity masking etc (and there is a lot of that going on in this image).

However, this time I also took multiple exposures with identical camera settings and blended those…

Normally this would be pointless…

But see that big wave in the foreground?

It happened… just technically not all at the same time 😉

It’s a combination of two waves, crashing into the rocks from a different angle (basically the left half and the right half).

There are a couple of reasons I chose to do this.

First, one wave without the other really throws the balance of the composition.

Big waves really were rolling in to cover the main foreground area like this, but only occasionally (I saw one before setting the shot up).

The second reason is that the good light was disappearing fast and I didn’t want to miss it waiting for the big wave to come.

So I shot each wave that rolled in over a period of a few minutes, then selected the best ones to combine into one with some reasonably straight-forward layer masking, to create the finished shot.

You’ve probably realised by now that I don’t mind making these slight reality-adjustments to my shots. It’s all in good fun.

If you want to start this week off learning some new skills to increase your creativity and productivity in Photoshop…

Then check this out (click here).

Talk soon,
Steve