Last weekend, my family spent a few days at a classic British seaside resort. It was an opportunity to test my monochrome recipe
In my last blog post I showed how I created a high-contrast monochrome recipe for my Sony camera, so I was quite excited to try it out when we visited the classic British seaside resort of Cromer in Norfolk.
I was excited because this was a busy weekend. Our current location in Thorne, South Yorkshire, is nice and all that, but it’s not the best place for street photography, especially tucked away in a boat yard. Cromer on a Bank Holiday weekend, on the other hand, was heaving!
The recipe I’ve been working on is quite flexible. As you can see from the low-light shots, the darks render a proper inky black, but they are also flexible enough to produce clean images in bright sunlight.
Pretty much all the images you see here were straight out of the camera jpegs.
As you can see a lot of the night shots were shot at very high ISO because I didn’t want to slow down my shutter speed too much. I will still shoot at 1/200 to maintain some flexibility with depth of field.
In many cases, I was using the Sony’s screen to frame my shots. This is unusual for me as I tend to use the viewfinder. However, I was conscious of not attracting attention, and some of the photographs were purposely taken at a low angle. It’s moments like these that I realise how useful a tilting screen would be, although that wouldn’t have helped with the portrait shots. That’s where the flip-out screen is preferable.
These are just a few photographs I took during our four-day stay. You can see a bigger montage in the video below, posted on our followtheboat youtube channel.