Lighthouse, New Brighton

Lighthouse, New Brighton was taken in - well, I'll let you hazard a wild guess where it was taken - during the "blue hour" on an October evening.  The tide was coming in rather rapidly, so each exposure was a race between composing the shot and seeing the tripod sink slowly into the sand!  As with Wharfedale Hillside I knew that I'd want to lighten the image and print it on a soft, textured art paper.  In fact, the processing of this image is pretty well identical to the other one, with the obvious exception that there weren't any trees growing in the the River Mersey...

This is the original image straight out of the camera.  Photoshop was used to level the horizon and clone out the lights from shipping and the Liverpool side of the river.  The image was then blended with a lightened, softened copy of itself before adding grain and fixing the tonal balance in Nik Colour Efex Pro.  A small amount of dodging and burning was used to emphasise the texture in the sky and the water, and to bring out details in the lighthouse itself.  Canon 5DmkII, EF 24-105/4L, 37s @ f/22, ISO 100.

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