Beachy Head and the Seven Sisters, East Sussex, UK

[thereyougo!]

Did a 500 mile round trip yesterday to do some shooting in the South East of England around Eastbourne. There are glorious cliffs around here including Beachy Head. The Seven Sisters (soon to become The Eight Sisters due to erosion) are often used in films such as Atonement as a stand-in for "The White Cliffs of Dover" They also appear at the start of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves under the same subterfuge. Was a blustery Autumnal day, I think the UK is pretty much getting permanent Autumn!

All with Pentax 645Z

1. FA 80 -160 at 160 - cropped in a bit

Beachy Head-2 copy by singingsnapper, on Flickr

2. FA 33 - 55 at 33mm

The Seven Sisters copy by singingsnapper, on Flickr

3. FA 45 - 85 at 45mm

The Seven Sisters-2 copy by singingsnapper, on Flickr

4. As above

The Seven Sisters-3 copy by singingsnapper, on Flickr

 

[Tim Tucker]

Nice but I would lay off the clarity slider a little, in no. 4 the amount of micro-contrast you've added (near white to near black) across the foreground on the virtually neighbouring pixels of the pebbles I find quite harsh and difficult to look at. Clarity and sharpness are relative effects, so if you back off clarity it will always look softer, but only relative to the before version. It's easy to over-do.

Also in adding that sort of micro-contrast for a web based image you not only add a lot of extra black uniformly across the image, but you also remove the subtle variations in tone and contrast that define sunlight and shadow. So in some respect you remove the visual impression of the light, and the added uniformly distributed black darkens the image. If I look at no. 4 (and it looks like you separated the foreground from the un-sharpened sky) to me it seems that the foreground is under a slightly duller light than the sky suggests.

Also I would feather the mask to soften the dark line at the top of the foreground cliffs. It's the sharp boundary that highlights the different treatments, softening it over a few pixels goes a long way in making that disappear.

 

[thereyougo!]

Thanks for the feedback, it's appreciated. I have scaled back quite a bit on the use of clarity over the last few years. I selected the cliffs and then inverted the section to put in a software ND that only covered the sky and the beach. I agree that the join is too visible...