subscribe 0330 333 1113 I http://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk I 27 July 2019 33
For this image, Charlie Waite used
a Nikon D800 with 24-120mm f/4 lens.
The exposure was 1/60sec at f/22, ISO- The focal length of the lens was
92mm, making it a short telephoto
landscape scene. The sky didn’t require
the use of any ND grads. ‘I’ve never been
a big fan of super-wide images,’ Charlie
says. ‘A wideangle shot looks like a
wideangle, and doesn’t have any
parity with what the eye
sees. For this image, the
wall and rock needed to
be compressed and
snuggle up to
each other a bit
more, hence
the focal length.’
would pull together every CHARLIE’S KIT
element. ‘It was pretty dead,’ he
says, ‘and it needed something
to animate it. Although the
waves were good, they weren’t
enough. Then, would you
believe, enter left was a man
with a bag. It was an absolute
gift. He wasn’t so close as to
be identifi able, but it brought
life into that part of the
photograph. I almost waited
for him to go, but I’m glad
I didn’t. And the fact that
his carrier bag was yellow
completed everything.’
One of Charlie’s concerns was
that he might be accused of
increasing the saturation of the
orange wall, which was already
being intensifi ed by the
mid-afternoon winter light.
After all, it looked unrealistic
to him – why wouldn’t it be the
same for someone who wasn’t
actually there at the time? ‘It
can ruin the photograph if
someone is suspicious of it,’ he
says. ‘So I took a shot of the
scene both on my phone and
with a diff erent camera, to
make sure I’d got it right. And
even then, I ended up actually
reducing the colour slightly
when I processed the image.’A diff erent direction
Noting that this image doesn’t
fall into his usual ‘signature
style’ of photography, Charliesays he’s going through what
he calls a ‘geometric’ phase.
‘It might be a brief fl urry. And
it’s not that I don’t want to do
“rocks, seas and trees”, it’s just
that in this instance I wanted
to hook up a bit of architecture
that has a utilitarian function- namely the wall, which is a
sea defence – with the distant
rock. Some people who look at
my eff orts might think, “What
the hell is that?” but I’m OK
with that. We’re all
just having a go at
fi guring out what
life is about, and
photographers
do it through
photography.’
wideangle, and doesn’t have any
parity with what the eye
sees. For this image, the
wall and rock needed to
be compressed and
snuggle up tomy efforts might think, “What
the hell is that?” but I’mOK