On the way in I found this group of trees and was trying to see a way of featuring them in a picture. It was only on the way back, after lunch, that I realized that the barb wire could make up for a nice leading line (or curve!). The challenge for this was to make the wire stand out. Using layers in Gimp, I applied a gradient with a very strong blue filter on the bottom part of the picture to darken the grass as much as I could. Then I applied a red filter with gradient on a separate layer for the top half of the picture to recover something from the sky (which was essentially featureless, but light blue). This is the result.
The next picture is a view of the Seven Sisters, with the bench in the foreground to counterbalance the view. This is more or less the typical picture that you may have seen on different places, so nothing of much interest here, other than I was shooting this with a 50mm prime and run out of space for “foot zooming”. Hence, I had to cut the cliffs to the right of the Birling Gap in order to feature all the “Sisters” in full.
With the sun setting in, I managed to capture the walkers of the next picture as they were approaching Cuckmere Haven from Seaford. Exposed to the sky so that detail there was preserved but also to throw the figures in silhouette as much as possible. Alas, some ground detail is still clearly visible on this one, which I think fits the picture well. At this time, the weather was much more pleasant and more people were starting to walk along the Vanguard Way from Seaford, in contrast with the solitude of the place in the morning.
“The Ascent” is taken in the steepest part of the Vanguard Way from Seaford, and the scares in the cliff created by erosion have always caught my eye. This picure is a revision of one I took last summer. The thing that bothered me in the previous one is that it was out of focus. I had the lens pre-focused in manual at a large aperture but unfortunately; the subject was too close and therefore, just outside of the hyperfocal distance range. I could not make the adjustments on time for a repeat and then when I tried to repeat it later on that day, the light conditions were not adequate. Hence I gave up and decided to go for the original picture anyway because I liked the composition. This time on my way back on the same spot, with the 28mm A set hyperfocally at f5.6, I spotted this subject doing the same ascent again and instinctually turned around and shot. Lucky me this time everthing went fine and the picture turned out as I originally envisaged. This was converted to B&W using channel mixer in Gimp to try to get an IR look.
Back in Seaford, the last picture of the trip is this mask. This is the window of some Ballet / Dance school in the town. This was a challenge in post-processing, as it required careful use of burn to eliminate reflections on the glass.
