The Artful Engineer

Botany Bay is a popular name: Vancouver Island’s version has homonymous counterparts in England, South Carolina, and—most famously—Australia. I have not been to any of the others (yet!) but they all seem to be more dramatic landscapes than this one. This beach was kind of a tweener: it was a lot rockier than a proper beach but those rocks didn’t have much in the way of height. On the day we visited, there also wasn’t any big surf or interesting clouds. Lacking any available features with vertical extent, most of my better images were either cropped wide—as with the image above—or tight—as with the next image below.

Once cropped into its wide aspect ratio, I liked the overall composition of the above image, but the interesting part of the image—the center area where the mini streams of water are pouring into the pool—was way too dark relative to the brighter parts at the top of the image. My post-processing solution was to double-down on the mistiness of those brighter areas: I brightened their shadows to reduce the contrast and toned down their detail, too. Basically, I tried to reduce the visual interest of the brighter areas to help out the center area. I also tried to boost the center area, but needed to keep it subtle or it would look unnatural. I’d be interested to hear in the comments whether all this effort was successful.

Whereas the image above was a long exposure, the next image was extremely short. I probably got a little carried away with the ISO (at 1600) but the frozen motion of the water pouring down the rocks certainly provides a visual focus. It is also helped by the out-of-focus background and the warm sidelight. As with the scene above, these rocks only protruded two or three feet above the water.

As mentioned, the waves were not very impressive. I did, however, capture this nice backlit one. The green and blue make a nice color combination. As with the rocks above, this wave was only a few feet high and the tight view was made possible by my long zoom lens.

As the sun lowered in the sky, I started making more images towards the sun. All of the moisture in the air resulted in nice layers of silhouettes that progressively lose contrast into the distance. I wasn’t happy with the color of the water in my initial edits (it was too blue and looked funny) so I toned the blues down a bit to make the color palette more harmonious:

The explosion of color that one usually hopes for at sunset never really materialized, but I liked the colors in this tight sky detail. The “background” sky has nice complementary colors—blue above and yellow below—and the wispy white cirrus clouds contrast nicely with orange “foreground” clouds. I wouldn’t hang it on my wall, but I think its a nice image:

As we waited around until blue hour, nothing crazy happened with the colors, but I did break out my crazy-wide 9mm lens. One advantage of such a wide view is that it can pick up structure in the sky that is happening at a very large scale: the long threads of magenta clouds are only long threads because they are actually in the frame. The sky doesn’t have enough going on to carry the image alone, in my opinion, so the inclusion of the boulders in the foreground helps with that. The reflections off the tops of the boulders (especially the central one) help to tie the foreground and the background together. This lens definitely vignettes a lot. I could reduce it in post-processing, but since there’s not a lot happening on the periphery anyway, it seems best to embrace it. The result is a quiet and peaceful image:

Thank you for following along. I was initially skeptical about doing a post of this outing at all, but in the end found enough images that I was happy with. Looking at them now, there is a real variety. As always, I would love to get comments on this post and any of these images. For the curious, I am planning two more posts about Vancouver Island and then will move on to somewhere else.

Santorini Gallery is Online

I also want to mention that I am starting to add some image galleries. The first one that I have finished is from Santorini. There is a link in the menus at the top of the page, but you can get to it directly here. I plan to cap the galleries at 24 images each: infinite online galleries always make me lose patience and I would rather people are disappointed to reach the end than give up due to fatigue. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.