Another shot of one of my favourite piers.

A shot of The Deckhouse, the recently refurbished coffee shop on St. Annes pier.

Here's another shot of one of my favourite structures: the old pier at St. Annes.

At some point I guess I'll either get fed up of photographing the old pier or St. Annes, or run out of ideas, but I hope it's not for a while: I love this structure :)

Another shot of St. Annes pier – one of my all time favourite structures – taken a few weeks ago while wandering around the Fylde coast with Simon Jenkins.

I've still got quite a few shots to post from my recent trip to Jura, but thought I'd post this one today as I'm about to add it as my latest Mini-PSD.

As you'll see, if you've already taken a look at the original, I made a significant change to the way in which this appears to be lit, i.e. it now looks as though the sun immediately above the structure. My reason for doing this is that the original, despite being structurally interesting, just looked dark and flat.

Let me know if you think it works.

And if you're wondering what it is, it's a straight-up view of one of the spires on St. Annes pier.

I've photographed this structure before, but it never fails to inspire me: taken while out shooting with Simon Jenkins yesterday morning.

Here's another one from my recent trip out with Andrew Thatcher: the old end of the pier at St. Annes. As always, let me know what you think.

I've also uploaded this one as this week's Mini-PSD as the change between the original and final image is quite dramatic.

This is a shot of one of my favourite structures, the old end of the pier at St. Annes, on the north west coast of England. I've photographed it many times before but this is one of my definite favourites.

I've also added this one as this week's Mini-PSD as the processing was quite interesting, particularly in terms of balancing the left side of the image with the right. If you've taken a look at the original you'll see that the left-hand third is quite a bit darker than the rest of the image. When I took the shot I thought that this would prove to be an interesting aspect of the final image. The more I worked on it though the less I liked it – it just looked wrong, as though I'd added the extra darkness/density on purpose.

Anyway, after a while I realised that it wasn't going to work so reprocessed it to balance both sides. If you're subscribed to the tutorials and download this Mini-PSD you'll see that the first curve is labelled Curves 17, a fair indication of just how long I messed around with this one before deciding on a strategy that would work :)

captured camera lens focal length aperture shutter speed shooting mode exposure bias metering mode ISO flash image quality RAW converter image editor plugins (etc) cropped?

1.29pm on 20/9/11 Canon 5D Mark II EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM 24mm f/11.0 1/320 aperture priority +2/3 evaluative 100 no RAW Camera Raw Photoshop CS5 Topaz Denoise 16x9

It's been a while since I posted a shot of the old pier at St. Annes, and while this isn't especially dramatic I do like it.

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3.05pm on 26/3/11 Canon 5D Mark II EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM 57mm f/11.0 1/60 aperture priority -1/3 evaluative 100 no RAW Camera Raw Photoshop CS5 Topaz Detail minor

As many of you know, I was back in the UK last month, providing some one-to-one photography and post-production training for Jason Kotecha. We both had a great time, and both got some great shots, but this is the last one I'll be posting; taken moments before we packed up our gear and headed home after a long day's shooting down at St. Annes.

As it was such a great day, I've included all the day's shots below the main image. I hope you enjoy looking through them again as much as I enjoyed shooting and post-producing them.

Coincidentally, Jason posted his last shot today too:

http://www.escapism-online.com/blog-entry.php?pid=288

On a related matter, Jason, Catalin Marin and I have just started a new venture: Photoshop tennis. If you're interested in finding out a bit more about it, and seeing our first game, you can do so here:

http://www.facebook.com/Photoshop.Tennis

The basic idea is that each Friday, at or around 4pm GMT, we'll post three different edits of the same RAW file. Initially, we're going to post all three anonymously, but will let you know who produced each version after a day or so. Our first set of images have already generated some interesting responses :)

I don't think I'll ever tire of photographing this former section of St. Annes pier – it's a wonderful structure. Jason also posted another shot yesterday:

http://www.escapism-online.com/blog-entry.php?pid=280

In other news: I've recoded my templates to make the 'show the original' feature a bit tidier. I've also added the same functionality to the individual pages in my galleries. As best I can tell, it works as it should, but do let me know if you have any problems with. Oh, and my apologies if you're using IE7 or IE6, but IE is such a dog of a browser to code for that I've disabled the feature rather than spend hours trying to write conditional code and CSS to make it work. If you really need to run IE (hint: get Firefox, or Chrome, or any other browser for that matter) then download version 8.

Oh, and I'm also compiling a list of photoblogs that have a 'show the original image' feature that switches one image for another (i.e. I don't mean ones that have the original and processed images both visible at the same time). So far I've come across these ones:

http://movie.leova.com/ (the earliest example I know about)
http://www.escapism-online.com/ (Jason's site)
http://mynicki.net/
http://www.momentaryawe.com/
http://kevoto.com/
http://alangraham.co.uk/

If you know of any others, or are planning on implementing this feature yourself, let me know and I'll update the list.

Update: here are some more blogs that have been drawn to my attention since I posted this entry:

http://www.batailley.net/
http://www.endlessinstant.com/photoblog/
http://www.andreapress.net/
http://dailypicture.v-raven.de/
http://www.butterweck.de/pholog/
http://photoblog.wojciechjarosz.com/

This is the third image in my St. Annes sunset series (the first two are here and here) and may well be my favourite of the four.

This one was converted to black and white using the channel mixer (as described in my Black and White: part one tutorial), then toned using the selective color tool (see my Toning Colour Images tutorial).

On a related note, and as you'll see if you read the 'latest news' bit below, you can currently sign up for one of three of our Photoshop tutorials for free. Our Toning Colour Images tutorial is one of these so, if you're interested in finding out a bit more about the toning techniques I use for both my colour and black and white images (e.g. curves, selective color, channel mixer), sign up for that one.

This is the second of four sunset shots, all of which were taken on the 9th April down at St. Annes (the first one is here), and despite the similarities between this and the previous one, it was shot over an hour later, just as the sun was dipping towards the horizon. I'll post the other two over the next week or so.

If you're interested Jason's second shot of the same sunset is here …

http://www.escapism-online.com/blog-entry.php?pid=267

… and he's also blogged a shot of me on the pier and some thoughts on how the training went here:

http://www.escapism-online.com/blog-entry.php?pid=269

As I mentioned when I posted body art #1, Jason and I had gone down to St. Annes to photograph the pier at sunset. As you have already seen though, we ended up shooting a variety of portraits first, but as the evening wore on we got our sunsets too.

I'll be posting four of these over the coming weeks: shot between 6.34pm and 8.09pm on the 11th of this month. All of them feature the old pier at St. Annes, and all are shot from much the same angle, but the sky changed so quickly and dramatically that all four are worth posting.

In terms of the post-production, and as you can see from the original, I didn't do a great deal to this one other than to bump up the contrast (using a Curve) and the saturation (using a masked curve and the Hue/Saturation tool).

Jason's first shot of this scene is here:

http://www.escapism-online.com/blog-entry.php?pid=264

A couple of entries ago I said that my previous would be the last I'd be posting from my various trips out with Craig a few weekends ago, as I'd looked through the hundreds of shots we had taken and couldn't see anything else that would work. Anyway, Craig posted this shot a few days ago, and as I'd shot much the same sequence of images I thought I'd see how mine turned out.

As with my previous couple of shots this is an HDR, constructed with Photomatix Pro, but I've tried to keep the tone mapping quite moderate with this one. It's not entirely what I was after, but in this case I couldn't quite work out how I wanted the final image to look. Initially, I was going for a colour version - much as Craig did - but I just couldn't get the balance between the pier and the sky looking anywhere near natural.

Anyway, to cut a long story short I ended up going for a black and white version that I toned with a Curve.

As always, let me know what you think.

Oh, and in case you haven't seen this structure before, it's both bits of the pier at St. Annes.

Finally, my next HDR class with PPSOP (the Perfect Picture School of Photograph) will be starting on Friday (i.e. the 6th), so if you want to learn a bit more about constructing HDR images you might want to take a look. Alternatively, you can take a look at either or both of my HDR tutorials (details about part one are here, while details about part two are here).

First of all, thanks for all the great comments on my last entry. As always, they're much appreciated.

As for this one: it's been a while since I went down to St. Annes, and even longer since I photographed the pier, so I headed down there this morning. I had intended to shoot some long exposures while this section of the pier was under water, but must have misread the tide times because by the time I got there the tide was already quite some way out.

Anyway, I spent about an hour taking photographs, and can't say that I'm particularly impressed with any of the other shots that I got. I like this one though.

In terms of the post-production: there were two things I concentrated on here - balancing the sky to the foreground (using two masked Curves), and toning the image using a Curve to alter the blue and green channels. If you're interested, I've posted a copy of the original here:

.../archives/tide_down_5.php

I've been meaning to try a panoramic shot for ages and am reasonably pleased with how this has turned out. It was created from seven originals taken at 17mm, using Stitcher. This does a much better job than Photoshop's 'photomerge' function, which is ok for shots with no distortion, but doesn't do a great job with wide angle shots; i.e. there's too much distortion.

Anyway, I'm not entirely convinced that I got the composition right – I probably should have shot the sequence in portrait rather than landscape format, and I think it needs a bit more space on the right – but other than that I think it's probably ok. Let me know what you think.

Oh, and if you're interested, there's a larger version of this image here:

.../archives/caught_in_the_middle.php

I've been struggling for inspiration recently, so rather than attempt something new I revisited one of my favourite haunts today – the pier at St. Annes.

This is the third and final shot in this small series, and as you can see, it's taken from somewhat further away than the other two. Actually, up until getting the 5D this shot wouldn't have been possible as it's shot at 17mm and the remainder of the pier (visible on the right hand side of this shot is at my back; i.e. with the 1.6 crop on the 20D it wouldn't appear to be quite so far away.

As for the three as a whole, I think the first is definitely my favourite, with this one running a reasonably close second. Yesterday's, on the other hand, had many elements that I liked – the toning, the detail, and so on – but the shot as a whole didn't seem to work quite as well as this one and the first one.

As always (though I'm sure you get fed up with me saying this), I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.