Now how many times have I heard that particular line said only to be offended in the next sentence? Numerous times, that’s how many. However, no matter how many times I’ve heard it or how many times I am going to hear it, I do honestly believe that the person saying it doesn’t actually mean to offend. At least, I will always give them the benefit of the doubt, cos 9 times out of 10 I really don’t mean to offend when I utter those immortal words.
Anyways, the reason I start this particular blog with this particular sentence is that I always seem to have this habit of unintentionally offending people. And this particular week seems to be no exception. You may have read that I went to St Andrews last weekend (is it really the weekend again? Thank God I hear you say! I second that) and I went with Debbie as I really wanted to take some photos for my website.
We got there, had our usual coffee and scone (rock and roll, eh!) at our usual coffee shop and then we headed off down to the beach to take some photos of the castle first of all followed by a drive to the other beach to take some photos of the whole of St Andrews. Got some lovely photos I may add and I was really excited to load them off my camera and play about. I got a great picture of the beach walkway and I then tweaked it to be a dark sepia colour as the sky in the background dictated I do so. It did really. It told me to “change the colour of this photograph to dark sepia or else!” I didn’t want to find out what the “or else” part of that sentence was going to be so I changed it. You can see how the photo looks below:
If you zoom into the photo, you can see a very cool sign that someone has put up about dog fouling.. No, I don’t mean a desperate slide tackle out with the normal rules of a challenge but more the fact that people don’t clean up after their dogs. That is one thing that really grates my nipples. People really should clean up after their dogs. It reminds me of a funny story when my friend Aldo and I were at our friends wedding in Clonakilty, Eire, and we were all mulling about on the lawns, drinking champagne. As we were walking about, we noticed that someone had stood in some dog poo, to which we were giggling away and saying things like, “I wonder which idiot did that!”.. Lo and behold, did Aldo not look down and find out that it was him! Cue me laughing my behind off and barely able to breath. Reasoning behind that is that we were all wearing kilt brogues, which in themselves are expensive shoes but they have a very ornate brogue pattern, which just happened to hold onto quite a lot of said poo. As I would say, Classic!
Back to St Andrews then. So I walked over the walkway and decided that I wanted to take a panoramic photo of the front of St Andrews. So, camera out, focus on the buildings and I decided that I was just too far away to take pictures with the 24-70 on the camera. I could have walked closer but I was a good 10 minutes away from where I would have to be and the light was fading fast. So I then did something that I said I never would. Changed my lenses on the beach. Dangerous move as sand can be flying about all over the place but I lucked out somehow as no sand got into the camera.. Phew.
So with the 70-200mm lens bolted onto the camera, I mounted it onto the tripod and took 5 photos in landscape format. Once stitched together in Photoshop, I then tweaked the colours and brightened it a little and cloned some distractions out and straightened the horizon. I’ve also added in a little watermark to the photo but I am not to sure if I will go down this route or not. Jury’s still out on it for me. That’s for a future blog for me to argue over the use of them or not. Here’s the photo:
In terms of the watermark, I really think it sort of detracts from the look of the photo but then again, I don’t want my photos being pinched without some credit.
So to finish off, this is where the next offence by myself came into existence. I asked my friend at work to take a look at the photo and give me some critique on it. I know he LOVES St Andrews so his comment was just, “cracking photo but no offence, leave St Andrews alone, as that is my domain”.. No offence taken. To be honest, it was a tongue in cheek comment taken as such. St Andrews is all yours again Dave.
Don’t get me started on watermarks I use them all the time on my pics that I put on my website or FB as they were getting pinched all the time. Also if someone asks to see some samples before buying a print I always stick the watermark on as twice people just took the sample and had it printed, cheers Tesco. I even had one client as me if I had any prints without the words across them. Oh the joys