Description
As many of you will be aware I am very fortunate enough to have a friend who owns a boat. A recent sunny day I received a text along the lines, ‘Mate, boat today! And the weather could be promising, so don’t forget to bring that Camera of yours’. Of course, he didn’t actually write that, for two reasons. The first I that, as author I can paraphrase, and second, he would never write that many words in a text.
We drove to Brooklyn, we sailed on the Hawkesbury past Dangar Island and all the other islands, we moored, we had lunch, we had fun, the clouds came and went. As usual, and as I have explained to my friend many times, and he now fully understands, photographs on the water are Difficult. It is nigh on impossible to get any foreground into an image taken form the water, (what was that about a Front, a Middle, and a Back for photos? That I might have banged on about in my blog a couple of times). In addition, boats sway and move. A lot. Thus framing, and particularly use of corners in an image, is a challenge.
So! This I was happy with. It’s one of several I took as we approached the Hawkesbury Rail Bridge as the sun lowered in the sky. I would have taken maybe a dozen frames, and immediately discarded over half as the horizon was not straight enough to make even vaguely usable (too many pixels just thrown away). The rest had poor composition – I usually use a tripod and carefully frame. So they went.
The final goodness about this image came with a 2.4 to 1 crop from the original 3 to 2 ratio. Doing this I used the top left corner with the bridge bisecting the corner to give a Strong Line, and there is complementary interest in the bottom right corner as well, with the pylon shape. So to me it’s balanced nicely.