The most you can hope for as a photographer is to take a picture which you will never tire of looking at. It may seem like a greater compliment for a picture that someone else will never tire of looking at it, but with an ability to “see” a picture comes the ability to see flaws in your own pictures and so the holy grail of photography for me is an image that I will look at again and again and every time think: “Yeah, that’s a good one”. The photograph above is one such image.
I can’t say this photograph has stood the test of time, as I only captured it on Saturday evening and post-processed it on Sunday evening, so it’s still in its infancy. However I can take solace from the reaction of others who have seen it in print, full screen on my laptop, and indeed on Facebook, where the number of “Likes” is, in my mind at least, symbolic of the number of people who themselves thought “Yeah, that’s a good one”.
The photograph was captured in Howth, which is probably obvious to everyone who knows Howth. I was in the area on Saturday evening for a photography gig – taking a few group photographs at a 90th birthday party – and afterwards met my wife and my parents (who were visiting for the weekend) in Aqua, which sits at the end of the pier with what you would term panoramic views.
After dinner there was time (and weather) to walk off dessert with a walk along the waterfront and out to the end of the pier. About half way around my father spotted some young gulls sitting at the end of a slip, and has he made his way towards them, pointed out to me how their parents in the sky above were getting more and more protective of the young by getting more and more aggressive towards him. He wasn’t even half way down the slip before the young took flight, and as he reached end of the slip I quickly took three photographs.
In the first he was taking the last step of his stroll down the slip, in the third he was turning to walk back up the slip, but in the middle shot, for the briefest of moments, he was standing, hands in pockets, watching the adult gulls in the sky above, and helping to make, for me at least, a very strong image.
It was only afterwards that I spotted the couple on the jetty beyond him walking back towards Howth Yacht Club. I debated whether to remove them in post processing but, as my father pointed out, they add depth and scale to the image.
The image itself is post-processed as a pseudo-HDR image – that is, I took the single RAW file, exposed it at -3 stops, 0 stops and +2 stops, and merged the three exposures using the Photomatix plugin for Aperture. There are those who will think the HDR treatment spoils the image, but the “straight” image doesn’t have the detail in the sky that was present on the evening, and doesn’t do credit to what I saw at the time of capture – it’s more of a “Yeah, that’s not too bad” type of shot. The level of detail in this version makes it a winner for me.
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