Blog Post #31

Kernow With My Camera

Its been an eventful few weeks here. Firstly there was the contracting of Covid-19 and then a 5 day visit to Cornwall. Having been triple-jabbed I was grateful that I could self-isolate at home, albeit coughing away. Although being C-19 negative for a while now I still feel it in my chest. It was fortuitous therefore that we had planned a 5 day visit to Cornwall before succumbing to the virus. I had never been to Cornwall so with the Fuji X-T3 and a few lenses packed we headed south. The weather was looking really bad for the first 3 days of the trip so it was going to be a challenge to get some good shots. As it turned out street photography provided slim pickings as it was out of the holiday season and the weather was so poor, therefore everywhere was quiet. A lot of the shops were closed for the Winter season too so a lot of time was spent walking along the coast searching for seascapes and landscapes to capture.

We were based just outside the wonderfully picturesque fishing village of Mevagissey so that was top of the list for a visit. During the week we travelled a fair bit along the north and south coasts of the county, including a visit to Land’s End. Photography wise I struggled due to the lack of sunlight and was battling grey skies with low cloud and rain/mist. I decided to shoot at 1/250 sec. and use apertures of f8 min to f16 max. in order to get good depth of field in the sea/landscapes. I let the ISO rating therefore “float” on auto and decided to risk introducing grain/noise in the finished images. Looking at the metadata of the shots that I took over the 5 days, the ISO level went from 320 to 4,500 over the range of shots I took. I didn’t take all that many but here is a look at some that made the cut.

Mevagissey Harbour

This is a general shot of Mevagissey Harbour at low tide. I couldn’t decide whether I preferred it as a b&w or colour image so I produced both in Lightroom. As you can see the sky has no detail in it an is very bland.

The only street type image I shot was this one in St Ives. I liked the character outside a shop and decided to shoot it at low level to try and remove a lot of the clutter, tables and chairs etc. When I was post processing it in Lightroom, I decided to try out the new feature introduced to the software recently. This feature allows adjustment masks to be generated of Sky and Subject. As expected, on selecting Sky it struggled to find any. I then selected Subject and it accurately picked out the character. By then inverting the mask it rendered everything except the character in the adjustment mask. This then allowed me to drop the exposure and detail in the shadows behind the character which results in him standing out a lot more. I like it.

This shot was taken in heavy rain at Land’s End. The house in the distance is the first/last house in England depending on which direction you approach it from. Although sunny weather would have been nice, the stormy effect of the rain and wind added some atmosphere. What struck us was how blue the water was all along the coast. I also used the Lightroom sky/subject adjustment mask feature on this shot and it worked great I think. By adjusting the exposure, contrast and other attributes of the land and sky separately a better result can be achieved. I also created an adjustment mask for the house and used this to brush on what needed adjusted. By increasing the whites and highlights on the house only, it enables it to stand out and give the impression the sun is hitting it.

Port Isaac, or if you are a fan of the TV show “Doc Martin”, it’s “Port Wenn”. The visit there was weird as they had just finished filming the Christmas Special episode so the streets and house fronts were all decked out for Christmas! I think this is my favourite shot from the trip. It has been post processed in Lightroom again using the sky/subject feature and I have tried to capture the setting sun lighting up the building on the right. This utilised the adjustment brush feature and restricted adjustments to the building only. The colours were very subdued as the sun was so low behind the clouds so I prefer the b&w version.

As previously mentioned, the weather restricted things a bit but it was great to try something different and get some land/seascape shots in the camera, I will definitely go back to Cornwall again and hopefully the weather will be a bit more kind to me. I’ll close with a few more shots taken during the trip.

This shot of the coastal ruins of Botallack Tin Mine was taken on an iPhone 11 in strong wind and rain conditions.

I hope you have enjoyed this blog post and thank you for reading it. If you want to comment on this blog post please do so below or you can contact me by using the “Contact Me” facility in the website header.