Lost at sea

Photo highlight : Week 4

I’m posting a photo once a week on Friday afternoon to encourage me to reflect on the photos I’m taking and hopefully improve along the way.

As I often do, I took a stroll down to the sea front at lunch with my camera. Living in a small seaside town it is often quiet, offering a very peaceful and mediative walk. Through rows of impressive victorian era houses I come to the open expanse of the ocean.

On this walk to the beach I saw a woman alone in the distance. Satisfyingly, she was balanced in the frame by a buoy in the sea. I didn’t have a telephoto lens on me so this was as close as I could get.Although as any closer could have ruined the effect I wanted.

I’ve talked before about trying to improve my photography by looking to tell a story with my photos. For the first time, on seeing this I knew the story I wanted to tell; that of loneliness.

Up until I left for uni at 18 I lived in a very rural part of mid wales. It was very beautiful, but it was also very isolating in a way I didn’t really understand until I’d left. Looking back now it’s quite clear how separate from the world and others I was.

In this image I tired to capture that isolation. I wanted the subject to be small and almost, but not quite, lost in the expanse. Looking in the distance to another subject that is for now out of reach. It was also important that the primary subject has colour, in this case a yellow rain coat, that contrasts the rather barren and empty landscape.

With the editing I went far further than I normally do. I made an effort to make the beach have far less contrast so not to distract from the subject. An inspiration for this was James Popsys’ images. His shots often have the sky ‘blown out’ so to not distract. This is an artistic choice that is somewhat counter to the conventional idea of matching reality and ‘correct’ exposure. Instead the exposure is ‘correct’ for the artistic goal, not the role of documenting the scene.

The emotion I wanted to get across was a melancholy one. I feel I’ve achieved that. It is far from the flashiest photo I’ve taken and would do awfully on instagram. But so far, it’s the photo I’m happiest with. It has some technical successes’, the concrete path acting as a leading line to the subject and a vague adherence to the rule of thirds. But more importantly, it’s the first photo I’ve taken with an idea behind it.