Exploring Fine Art Photography
Just finished an extensive edit on one of my images, see the before and after below. Generally editing landscape or seascape images is a pretty quick process taking maybe 10-15 minutes, but to create a fine art feel is much more complex. The image below is one of the famous (well, famous amongst photographers) Pin Mill boatyard, it’s kind of a graveyard for old boats located on the Suffolk coast near Woolverstone, Ipswich. To be honest, I went there with the final result in mind, I have seen so many of these ‘fine art’ images on social media and decided I needed to attempt this myself, afterall, how hard can this be? Taking the picture is relatively simple, editing it into a fine art style is much more challenging.
I arrived in Pin Mill at lunchtime on a very sunny day, so not ideal, there was though some cloud, so undeterred I continued. The sun was harsh casting some deep shadows, but a little waiting around paid off and the sun retreated behind some clouds making a world of difference. Unfortunately, the scene contains a lot of distracting elements including the headlands behind the subject, sailboats, buoys and general seaborne debris, having seen a number of fine art ‘how to’ videos on YouTube I knew that these distractions are removable in Photoshop. I took multiple images at different angles and times, with sun without sun etc… Unfortunately, I do not live close to Pin Mill, so a return trip is not so likely. It was a still day with hardly any wind so most images were taken with long exposure, flattening the sea and showing some movement in the clouds.
As you can see the difference between before and after is quite stark! There are multiple ways to achieve this ethereal, minimalistic, no horizon style and for sure I don’t know all of them! But basically, I separated the subject (boats) from the background, then worked on extending the sky below the horizon (thus removing the headland), then re-insert the subject over the sky and lower background. Sound easy? Well, I took hours and hours to get this right, with many failed attempts, it’s much more tricky than I ever thought it would be!
I do though, love the result, whether it’s my style of photography and I engage in a repeat performance on another subject we’ll wait and see, love to know your opinion.