A nice, warm Dorset landscape image for a February Monday morning

Monday mornings. Don’t you just love em? Well I have decided that Monday mornings need some nice, uplifting imagery to cheer us all up.

Like this shot taken off the A35 outside Winterbourne Abbas of a field.

Yes, a picture of a field.

So why this?

Because it is nice. Pleasing. Colourful. That’s all.

This shot was taken hand held on my Canon 5D. I was drawn to the field, and the tractor tracks taking you from the front to the back of the scene. Then there are the lovely, warm, golden colours in the field, and of course that blue sky.

And this is where I have to confess to a bit of Photoshop work

Now you should all know by now that I am not the biggest fan of Photoshop – it is just too complicated and counter intuitive for me, but I do use it for a selection of things, including sky blurring. This was not a sky replacement, just a sky blur. No that Photoshop is nothing other than fantastic and incredibly powerful – just not as intuitive as Lightroom.

In Photoshop, just select filters (or fillets as I typed it before spell check kicked in), Blur gallery, and there they are. You make an adjustment mask, and apply the blur filer of your choice. I like path blur, as you can drag it left and right.

The sky in this image was fine, but I wanted more. So I used path blur to create the sky you see. And I have to say I like the effect.

Digression time.

I am going to revisit one of my most popular images in 500PX, Durdle Door, and see what I can come up with now. Its fine doing all these fancy things but they have to look natural and realistic.

Digression time 2.

So what else do I use Photoshop for? Check out a forthcoming blog post all about this, and how I use Photoshop in conjunction with Lightroom for my architectural photography work. The techniques I apply for my commercial work are different to my landscape photography work. For my commercial work I have to produce consistent images with my look, quickly and consistently, so I use Photoshop for some things that are quicker than in Lightroom.

So going back to this image briefly, the composition and colours are good, making the shot. You can forget all the technical stuff above – without a strong composition you have nothing in my view. With minimal processing this was a strong image, with a bit of work it has gone to that next level, which is where I want to take all my images. That is what sets professional photographers apart.

Thanks for reading this post, and hopefully tomorrow you will be able to come back to my blog at

www.rickmcevoyphotography.co.uk/blog

and see my polished Durdle Door shot. After that I am diving back into architectural photography mode for a few weeks, as I have a lot of recent work to write about, which I am excited about.