alan frost photography: 'People and Places'

Wednesday 12 September 2012

'People and Places' - Littlehampton Seafront

This is the second post which relates to Jacqui Hurst's 'People and Places' course I attended at West Dean College earlier this summer. In complete contrast to our visit to Glorious Goodwood we spent a day at Littlehampton; a typical and relatively small seaside resort on the south coast.

Whilst a colourful location I stuck to the brief I had imposed on myself at the begining of the course, i.e. choosing monochrome for all of my images. I tried to concentrate on textures, tones and good composition whilst trying to capture the 'feeling and atmosphere' of the seafront. Fortunately the weather was dry and bright so there were a fair number of people around. At times though it was overcast, but this helped from a photographic point of view as I did not have extremes of contrast to worry about.

Some of the group felt uncomfortable photographing people. I very enjoyed the experience and the Olympus EM5 certainly allowed me to be a little more discreet. Had I been using a substantial DSLR with a large zoom lens and I am sure I would have felt very different as I went looking for suitable subjects.

Once again the kit lens stayed in the bag and I switched between three primes lenses. 12mm, 20mm and 45mm which equate to 24mm, 40mm and 90mm if using a full frame 35mm sensor.

All the photographs were taken in RAW with an Olympus OMD EM5, imported into Lightroom and converted into black and white using Silver Efex Pro2. I have to say that Silver Efex Pro is a joy to use when converting images to monchrome. The contrast and structure adjustments can really bring the image to life, increasing tonal range and texture. I am still very much learning about black and white but for me there is a certain something about the results which pleases me.

Unusual bench seating along the promenade
Olympus EM5 12mm 1/160 f11 ISO 200