Rusty Grungy Winchy
A lovely day for taking photos at Castel Beach
There are lots of really nice beaches very close to where I live and today the sun was out and there was not a cloud in the sky. It was a perfect day to go out and take some photos at the beach. We went to a beach which is just north of Palomós called Castel Beach. It seems that lots of other people had the same idea as there were quite a few people walking around, riding around on bicycles, sitting around on the beach and enjoying themselves. Normally when I go there during the winter the place is deserted.
Myself and Victoria had an NEX-6 each to shoot some photos, with the sea a beautiful viridian green and it being a lovely warm sunny day in January we were bound to get some excellent photos. At the northern end of the beach there is a ruin of some sort, not much to look at or photograph but a good place to look down at the sea. The dog got lucky with getting some freedom to run around while we were busy with the cameras.
Kit lens or vintage Canon lens
I was able to get a vintage Canon lens very cheaply indeed from Ebay and an adapter to be able to fit it to the Sony NEX-6. The advantage of this lens is that it has a maximum aperture of f1.8, so it is a fairly fast lens and great for getting those photos where you want to have the background blurred out with a nice bokeh. I did use it for some of the photos that I took today, although I found that the Sony kit lens was better for what I wanted to do with the landscape photography.
On the southern side of the beach there is a path which takes you to a couple of tiny fishing villages. Well, calling them a village is a bit of a stretch as they are really just a couple of houses tucked away in the small coves. There used to be fishermen’s houses, but now they are used by the owners as leisure Beach houses. There were people at the beach that had been diving for the sea urchins and were sitting there using scissors to open up and eat them. You can’t get your sea fruits any fresher than that!
Rusty grunge winch machinery
As much as I like a beautiful landscape or seascape I would much prefer to find some textural grungy life and today I found an old rusty boat winch. It looked like it didn’t work any more and probably only worked as being something for the boat to be tied to on the beach. When I got back home I was able to add even more texture to the photograph by turning it into a HDR High Dynamic Range photograph. With the application Photomatix Pro is possible to go completely crazy and make a photo that looks like it came from Mars with wild saturated colour. Occasionally I do like to go fairly strong with the high dynamic range effect and today was one of those days although I did turn the colours down a little.
