With the sun shining and the heather still in bloom, I decided to take the route up Rhossili Downs and avoid the more popular route to the beach. The tide was coming in anyway. The heather is in dense patches, creating?areas of?colour on the underlying green landscape. The contrast was quite high, so I waited for a large cloud to provide some shade as I made the above image. I find you get a truer colour and better reproduction of the plant in soft light.
In brighter conditions I switched to the wider view with both panoramic and single frame views along the downs towards the north. The side lighting gave some relief to the texture of the landscape, so it doesn’t appear too flat in the brighter conditions.
As the conditions were so bright, I wanted to try and simplify the colours in some images, so I retreated from the heather to make it less obvious in the frame and tried to concentrate on the white, blue?and green of the surrounding landscape. I find these conditions quite challenging, as those who red my blog know, I have a bit of a dislike of blue skies and tend to avoid them when ever possible. I’m trying to learn to make images in these conditions, but still find it a bit of a struggle. I still consider the results more record shot as they don’t trigger any emotion within me as a viewer. That is the secret to any photograph; if you can engage the viewer and trigger some emotional response in them, they will view the image for longer and like it.
My final couple of images were looking down on Worm’s Head. The backlighting silhouetted Worm’s Head and washed out the colours, making it look quite pastel. The shadows of the clouds provide some pattern to break up the very bright highlights on the water. I quite like this graphic look and I find a lot of my images are quite two dimensional, where as a lot of photographers work hard to get a three dimensional feel to their pictures.
