Marsden Rock – Sunrise

New Journal 58 – Photography as a therapy

A reader emailed me to say that not long ago he was seriously ill but on the path to recovery. He found photography a very therapeutic activity that aided in his recovery. While I’m fortunately in good health, I couldn’t have agreed with him more.

A few years ago I unplugged myself from society in many ways. I’m firmly rooted in the internet photography community but beyond that I’m neither here nor there. I made the decision to stop reading the news. On the road I wasn’t surrounded by the complaints of every day life. We lived in a bubble, and we loved it. Since returning, 5 weeks ago, we’ve continued to live that way, not getting tangled up in daily problems that we rich Westerners deem terribly important.

When I’m behind my camera, I feel even more detached from the on-goings around me, like an observer who doesn’t really want to fit in. I’m sure that you, the reader, know exactly what I mean.

Rachel and I woke up at 4.45am yesterday morning to shoot the image above of Marsden rock, in South Shields. The cliff behind us is a very frequent suicide spot. Just last week some poor soul plunged to their death a few metres from where we were stood.

As I waited for the camera to finish its job, I was looking at the rock thinking it looked a lot like the Borg Collective in Star Trek. We were witnessing some beautiful colours in the sky, but only around the rock, much to my delight. The beach was empty. The roads were silent. The air was fresh but warm enough to sit still without our jackets.

Rachel started playing a brain training game on her ipad. I threw stones in the water and strolled about testing other compositions. I thought about that reader’s comment and wondered what I’d be doing right now if I hadn’t taken up photography. I decided that photography wasn’t just therapeutic, it had become a lifestyle for me, somewhere down the line. That lifestyle has given me the happiest years of my life.

I have a wish that my nieces and nephews all find an artistic endeavor in the future to which they’d happily dedicate their lives. Learning to express oneself through art and at the same time becoming detached from all the things we’re told to worry about, that for me is a magical thing.

Add to that this wonderful internet in which we can surround ourselves with like-minded artists and connect with so many as passionate as you on social networks – that is an incredible bonus which can only add to the richness of our daily existence.

Today’s Photo – Marsden Rock at Sunrise

Would you like to learn how to create this image? I’m going to create a full, free workflow next week for this shot which will be available to my tutorial subscribers. Find out how to subscribe on my Free Post Processing Tutorials page.

A few notes on this image: Firstly, I used luminance masks ahead of Rapid Blend If (RBI) because I wanted to blend very precise areas, which is certainly more accurate with LMs. I enhanced the greens in the rocks to compliment the pinks/blues in the sky. I decided to add the birds in simply to increase interest in that area. It’s a matter of taste, however, and I was 60/40 about including them.

I chose to use the water from the darker exposure because it contained more movement. I wasn’t looking for smooth, misty water like that seen in my Golden Gate bridge shot. Instead, I was looking for action or drama. To finish, I duplicated the layer and ran the Dodge tool over the water to brighten the white areas up. I changed the blend mode of that layer to Luminosity so that it reflected the change in brightness but didn’t change the saturation of the water.

Before/After Comparison