Week 3: At the Beach

Branford Point in Early Morning

For week three's assignment to visit the beach, I went to one of Branford's beaches, Branford Point, which is where Long Island Sound meets up with the Branford River.

 

I decided to convert all the pictures to black and white. For experimentation, I edited some of these pictures using the black and white tool, and for others I used grayscale.



 

 

Iron Ring
The sun was hitting these rocks beautifully and throwing off strands of light.

Shell with Sand in Hand
For this shot I held the shell in my hand and had a hard time focusing it,
but when looking at the image afterwards, I actually like the soft focus that was created,
and I cropped it to fill most of the screen. I wish I had shot in RAW
so I could adjust the picture so you could see the lines of my palm and the grains of sand on it.
(Shell in Hand is my Favorite Photo #1)

Tire Tracks in Sand
I adjusted something that made this photo look a
bit more granular than it was originally
[Now, if only I could remember what I did.]



Horseshoe Crab
For this picture when I brightened the horseshoe crab to highlight the barnacles
and create a focus point, I lost the shadow,
so I went back in and lassoed (I finally learned how to do that! Yay!)
and deepened the contrast on the back shadow.
(Horseshoe Crab is my favorite photo #2)



Beach Rake
In additional to level adjustments, I lassoed the tire and lightened it up so the tread would be visible.



Shell on Sand
Adjusting the contrast brought the clam shell striations out,
I lassoed the shadow just as I did in the horseshoe crab picture and deepened the contrast
to keep it from lightening up. I probably could have cropped this further to have the shell fill the shot,
but I liked the loneliness that it displayed surrounded by sand.

From here on it gets a little gritty with fish bait and beach trash.



Bait - Fish Head
There's just something about fish eyes.
I much preferred this photo in B&W as the bloody carcass was unappealing.

Bait - Fish Fin
I actually liked how the sun hit portions of the fin
and made it the fish tail luminescent.

Beach Trash - Marlboro Man
Cropped this picture and adjusted the levels
to have the white cigarette butt stand out from the debris.



Beach Trash
Coffee Cup Wedged in Rocks
For this picture, in addition to adjusting the brightness levels overall,
I lassoed the area above the cup to see the definition of the rock behind it.
I didn't do it to the bottom area of the picture as I liked the high contrast of black against white.



You can see in the latter pictures that one thing that was standing out to me was the amount of trash found at my local beach!

 

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Photoshop tools I learned this week:

• How to use the lasso tool.
• How to use the feather tool.
• How to use the erase tool. (Wow! That is a powerful tool!)
• How to use the grayscale and how to use the black and white tool.

 

Lessons learned this week:

• Shoot in RAW so you can make even more adjustments.
• Transitioning to black and white / grayscale photos created some beautiful luminescence from the sun on many of the objects.

 

Note to Professor Nevins: I know we were to only post two pictures here for week three and the rest were to go to our fotothing account, however fotothing.com is saying my photos are too large in file size - so I'm not sure if I should post them somewhere else, or if there is a way to reduce my file size.