Today’s post is a follow-up to yesterday’s image of the Ulster Bank HQ on the banks of the River Liffey as this shot was taken about 20 yards away from yesterday’s shot, and is pretty much just a wider view of the same scene. It illustrates to me though, how at any one location, or for any one subject, there are always many different photographs that can be taken.
Dublin Camera Club organizes many outings to different places and events and usually there’s a good turnout of members – for instance, last Sunday the club headed off to photograph Smithfield Horse Fair. I wasn’t able to go on that occasion, but I have been on some previous outings, and when I see the photographs that others took afterwards it is always striking how different people, at the same place at the same time and often photographing the exact same thing, can come away with very different images. I suppose that is one of the attractions of photography – each photograph is unique to the photographer, even if the subject has been photographed a thousand times before.
For the photograph above, having taken yesterday’s shot with my telephoto zoom, I switched to a much wider lens and recomposed from the centre of the Sean O’Casey footbridge on which I was standing. This shot was all about the sky, so I wanted to keep a large part of that in the frame. However I had a more pressing concern with the composition. The wider lens I was using was actually my fisheye lens, but in this case I wanted to use it merely as a wide angle lens and minimize any of its characteristic distortion.
That required me to put the horizon in the center of the frame. This conflicted somewhat with my desire for having the sky dominate the frame – a 50/50 split wouldn’t achieve this aim. But I knew I could crop the image later. In fact, the shot above is a crop from the centre of the full image – I also cropped out some of the sides of the image, where more and more of that fisheye distortion was creeping in.
I opted for a panoramic crop in the end, which I think suits the scene, and allows the quays on either side to draw the viewer into the centre of the frame.
I deliberately gave this image the exact same post processing as yesterday’s tighter shot to reinforce the idea of them being part of a set. I wouldn’t say I’ve really developed any one particular look to my images yet, but this particular type of processing for monochrome images really appeals – high contrast, but with a slight HDR feel, and a barely-there tint to the final shot.
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