On Dungeness shores
Raised wooden platform leading across the shingle beach of Dungeness Headland to the English Channel. April 2009 – dug deep from the archives.
I think this is such an evocative image. The expanse of conformity around you, and you're poised for a long journey to a mostly unknown destination. You can see some of the path ahead, and you know at some point what lies obscured will be known. And you're pretty certain that at the end of your voyage will be the ocean. You can hear it, and smell it, and almost taste its saltiness in the air, but it's beyond your horizon. You also feel a little stuck, because those pebbles are lethal to walk on – you definitely already tried that. You have to stay the course. Do you do it? Do you carry on? Do you trust that it will take you where you want to go?
Such is life, the wondering and uncertainty.
This is one of the very first panoramas that I ever took – maybe even the first one. At a first, non-pixel-peeping glance, you might be inclined to think, “damn, she aced it first try!” but that’s not actually true. I didn’t know at the time about AE lock and so of the five images this panorama is stitched from, there are changes in ISO, shutter speed, and aperture from one to the next. Fortunately, PTGui is such a powerful stitching program that it handles these variations admirably and I don’t think you can really tell by eye that there were variations in the original images. Now, a secret: it was a fairly overcast day and the real sky was just grey cloud – the sky seen here is taken from one of my other images. Years ago, it took me a very long time to work out how to do sky replacement in Photoshop, but Photoshop has advanced such that you can do it much better and more easily with just a few clicks, AI-powered. I’m delighted with their new tool and need to revisit a lot of my photos I had previously been lukewarm on due to their white, blown, or grey skies.
Almost all of the images from this trip to Kent are disappointing to me because another thing I didn’t know was how important lenses are to the overall quality of the images. I thought I was all professional and top of the line at the time with my only months-old Canon EOS 450D, and I put on it old lenses from my partner’s (at the time) film camera. I had no idea that over half the time I was using a truly awful lens – it was soft and made chromatic aberrations galore. Despite figuring it out relatively quickly, it was still the only long lens (75-300 mm) I had or could afford, and so I continued to use it for a while, even taking it to South Africa so it could disappoint me there too.
In hindsight, this panorama, while one of my favourites even today, was a lucky accident. It was one of my first ever outings with a “proper” camera, my first attempt at a panorama, and thanks to it being a wet and cold day, there weren’t dozens of people on the path as there are at most other times. Many panoramas that I attempted after this were abysmal failures, and don’t worry – I’ll be showing you those ones too! It’s often really helpful to see the things that don’t work and to (hopefully) figure out why, for next time.