We drove into Brighton along the seafront road with the intention of getting to a point where I could get shots of either of the two piers in the sunset. Unfortunately, as is often the case in Brighton, the traffic was against me!
I made it only about as far as the West Pier before I decided to change plan and park up. Part of the reason was a large flock of sea-gulls gathering on the rusting metal structure. Well, I got a few shots from the prom using my 18-200mm lens but frankly I wasn’t really enthusiastic with the results… A flock of birds, in the distance, with no real formation or pattern to them is not terribly appealing.
The light was pretty good though so I looked around for ways to use the light in a photo. I was looking for a landmark or feature to place in the foreground in some way. The bandstand is what I noticed and what I then spent until the sun had set working with. Luckily I had the tripod in the car so I set about it. There were lots of people desperate to get into my picture so I tried to “use” them in my shots. I think, in this case, the silhouettes work pretty well.
As the sun dipped further, I had to take all the opportunities I could to capture the sunset.
Since there were people determined to be in my picture. I figured I would remove the offenders from my final images by cleverly merging similar photographs (where the person was in different positions in each) so I took even more pictures than normal of seemingly the same scene! Wow! what a lot of photos to go through on the computer!
In the end, I liked the look of the one shown here.
The guy here looked so dishevelled and bored, he inspired me to start a new collection of photos which initially I called “tramps at sunset” but in the interests of political correctness, I’m now calling “Brighton sunset”.
