Synopsis: Mothering Saturday. Or at least, that’s what it is in our family. Decided to take Mum on a trip out, although overshot original destination and wound up in Brixham. Nice outing all the same.
My original plan had been to take Mum out for lunch at the Linny Inn, Coffinswell, but the traffic was snarled up at the Penn Inn roundabout so I attempted an alternative route that got us completely lost. We overshot Coffinswell and as I thought there was little point in returning from whence we came, we opted on continuing to Brixham. We parked in the Oxen Cove car park and walked back to the harbour area. There we found a very nice fish-n-chip cafe overlooking the harbour and guess what? Yes, we had fish and chips.
As we ate our lunch I commented to Mum on the excellent photos of Brixham that hung on the walls of the cafe. As we were leaving I enquired of the photos and was told that they’d been taken by a local photographer by the name of Chris Slack. Now there’s a fine name if ever there were one. Apparently Chris has a stall on the harbour side at weekends during the main holiday season. As Mum and I stepped out of the fish and chip cafe Mum happened to spot a card for sale on a nearby stall that was one of the pictures on the cafe wall. From this I was able to deduce that Chris has his own Chris Slack Photography web site from where it’s possible to see a selection of his work. One of Chris’s shots that impressed Mum and me was this photo of a lifeboat crashing through the waves. Very dramatic and nicely caught on camera.
Mum and went I for a little walk around the harbour. Nothing too strenuous as Mum was still recovering from a bad cold. Brixham is such a pretty place, it was nice to slowly wander around taking a few photos of my own.
Brixham harbour with church on hill
The day was a little overcast and the light rather flat. I thought my best chance of getting a decent image would be to look for shots that might lend themselves to tone mapping. This first shot is very simple, merely looking out across the beautiful harbour towards the church on the hill. I needed to increase the dynamic range a little and bring out some contrast, and yet I attempted to keep the shot reasonably realistic and gentle on the eye.
The replica of the Golden Hind in Brixham harbour
In this second shot the replica of the Golden Hind has quite stunning lines and the sky was doing some interesting things behind it, so I allowed myself to push the tone mapping really hard in an effort to create a dramatic image. Although artificially high on dramatic contrast, I feel the water craft have remained reasonably realistic and generally natural. I like the cold steel quality to the water.
There are a few more photos taken today in the Flickr photo set, a link to which can be found at the top of this blog post.
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