Life’s a Beach
By Brian Auer • November 8th, 2007
© Brian Auer | 10/13/2007 | Pacific Beach, CA | 157mm * f/2.8 * 1/4000s * ISO100
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I was in Pacific Beach a few weeks back taking some shots of whatever I could find. I was supposed to be focusing on minimalism for my October Challenge, but I couldn’t help myself with this one. There’s a path that runs along the back of the beach area that a lot of people use for walking and riding bikes, and I was sitting on the divider between it and the sand talking on the phone with my wife. I saw this beach cruiser coming and I had to grab a couple shots as it went by. And in case you’re wondering, the composition was intentional. I don’t know why, but I had been wanting to take a shot like this all day… so I finally did.
- In-Camera JPEG
The colors and such looked pretty good, but looking back I wish I had composed just ever so slightly higher to give me more freedom with the crop. - Processed RAW
Adjusted the white balance to not-so-warm; fiddled with some other settings, but nothing major. - Desaturation
I brought the saturation down to -57 with a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer. I felt like the color was a bit much for a dominantly monochrome image. - Blur-Overlay
After doing a visible stamp, I applied a Gaussian blur at 35 pixels (after trying a couple different settings). Then I changed the blend mode to Overlay and left the opacity and fill at 100%. - Curves Adjustment
After the overlay blend, the contrast was too much for what I wanted, so I backed it off with a backwards “S” curve (lighten shadows, darken highlights).
In the end, it’s pretty much what I had in mind. I wanted to show something kind of dreamy and care-free while capturing part of the culture in the Southern California beach towns.
Brian Auer is a photography enthusiast from North Idaho. He's also the guy behind the Epic Edits Weblog. As a hobbyist photographer since 2003, his passion has been to constantly improve his photography skill set, to share his own knowledge with others, and to become an integral part of the photographic community.
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lovely, this is so retroesque.
i bet it must be marilyn on that bike!
This is a very good image Brian. The post processing works well to create for me that old-time charm of a dream like image.
It just makes you wonder where he or she is heading.
Niels Henriksen
Nice shot, captures the moment. Would be nice to see the girl as a side shot