In April 2004 I had my first photo published in the Hotshots section of Digital Camera Magazine which was this photo of Brighton's Palace Pier that I took one weekend in March. This was one the most rewarding shots I've taken as I could see exactly the shot I wanted to create before I even took my camera out of the bag.

Behind The Shot
I had decided that I wanted a shot of The Palace Pier in Brighton so headed down to the beach one Saturday arriving at about 9am. As soon as I arrived I saw this shot but could see that the sun was too low in the sky to give the reflections I wanted so I went off to take some other photos of the West Pier and other scenes along the beach. After a couple of hours I could see that the sun was now where I wanted it and so set-up my tripod and fired off a few shots both in portrait and landscape orientation, trying to tie in each exposure with the waves rolling in. I already had in mind that this was going to be a black & white image and that I wanted to give the impression of dusk or night so back home I opened the image up in Photoshop and started editing.

I'm not a big fan of too much manipulation and this is probably the most manipulated shot I've ever taken. First of all I noticed that I had several dust specs on the photo which I cloned out and then set to work on the sun. In the original image the sun is clearly visible in the top of the frame, I didn't want to crop it out as that would ruin the composition and instead I wanted to give the effect of there being a moon behind the clouds back lighting them so I cloned some clouds to a new layer, positioned them over the sun, changed the opacity of the layer and blending modes and repeated until I achieved the effect you see here.

The final stage was to convert the photo to black & white for which I used the Channel Mixer. I wanted a high contrast image to give the impression of night and so used Red -200, Blue +160, Green +140 and applied a S shaped curve to the finished image.

As well as having this photo published I have also sold a 30"x20" framed print of it to a local Brighton business.

You can see this photo by clicking on the above image or by visiting my gallery.