This image was from our day in Dorset while we waiting for the Moon to be rising through the arch of Durdle Door. We had walked over the hills to Lulworth Cove in the afternoon to capture images of the Cove. While I watched parties of people preparing themselves to paddle canoes I noticed these shoes and the woman paddling.
Shoes off, time to paddle
Judge’s comments
… I think the photographer has definitely gone for artistic effect and what’s really interesting is that this is what is sharp in the picture – the shoes and they are fancy shoes.… the paddler, the shoe-less paddler, is some way out of focus and clearly that is entirely what the photographer intended to happen, also having them pretty much in the corner of the picture and she is looking out which is one of those cliched moments ‘no-nos’ and is is also entirely what the photographer wanted to happen
… so rules are meant to be broken and I think that they have been broken pretty effectively on this occasion because the eye moves from those [the shoes] to her and it kinda works there is a bit of a triangle shape going on
… and there is a lot of not terribly interesting beach in here in the middle of the shot, scruffy looking beach , how much does that matter?, if you’d got down a little bit lower you could have reduce the amount of beach but maybe you then have not got the angle that you needed on the shoes so maybe there wasn’t much you could have done about that
… but I do admire what you have done, here the bravery there, having someone so close to the corner of the picture and looking out like that.
… I think that’s worked pretty well. It is technically fine.
The scores
There were 17 images in this projected digital round in Division 1.
‘Shoes off, time to paddle’ scored 8.5.
The original image
I cropped the image to remove the people on the left of the image and used the Auto-adjustment in Lightroom to start my editing. Then I had to clone out some of the brightly coloured rubbish on the beach, a corner of a boat and mooring buoy. I still had a bit of beach in the top left corner and I cloned this out with more of the sea.
My other images from our afternoon at Lulworth Cove are here.