View From The Roadside

Sunset over South Parade Pier, originally uploaded by Liam O’Neill.

It’s been a while since we’ve had a photo club 2 hour challenge, and I missed the last one as it was. I almost had to skip this one too. The original date was the week before but the weather was terrible so we moved it back a week. That meant it was going to start just as softball training in Hursley ended, with the challenge being in Southsea. It was such a nice day though, that I brought the camera with me to training and went down to Portsmouth straight after, arriving a little before 3:00, with about an hour left.
I stayed around the Esplanade on the shoreline, I didn’t really have time to venture further inland, and street photography isn’t my thing anyway. Looking back I should have gone to Clarence Pier and Old Portsmouth, where some of the others were, but instead I went in the opposite direction and headed for Southsea Castle.

Shoreside, Southsea
Originally uploaded by Liam O’Neill.

Before I got there I found this structure just off the footpath. I don’t really know what it’s purpose is, though it’s clearly some sort of breakwater, presumably either to break up waves hitting the wall, or to somehow catch boats the run ashore. In the light of the low sun, the curves and pattern of repeating standing stones was too good to skip. This shot is actually taken on the way back. The first time I took some shots there were too many people moving along the path that I couldn’t get a clear shot, and didn’t have much desire to wait around. This is where the time limit idea can get in the way.
I continued on to the castle and it’s lighthouse, and while the light was great, there was no obvious picture from the waterside of the castle. I went around to the shore-side though, and thought I could do something with the pond and fountains there. I tried a number of shots but they weren’t great. They needed the sunlight to catch the fountains far more than it did, and they were ruined by some horrible lens flare sitting right on top of the lighthouse anyway.
I meant to come back via the tanks on the roadside outside the D-Day museum, but clean forgot to, coming back by the uninteresting bandstand instead, back to the bollard-thingy in the second picture. By now it was almost 4:00 and with the sun setting, I was only going to get to go to one more place. That had to be the South Parade Pier. I’d wanted to take a nice sunset shot there for a while, and this was the chance.
When I got there, instead of being almost empty, I found the beach full of fishermen, complete with tents all along the beach. At first I thought that was going to put pay to any go at taking a picture, but I went ahead anyway. I was going to have to go between the fishermen, but in order to see the pier and not the tents along the beach, I had to get a little closer than I might otherwise have preferred. Having found the spot, I set up the camera and took a first shot, a banker if you will. The sun was still a little high, with a real chance things might get even better as it set. I took a picture every few minutes, and as usual the preview image’s darkness made me take second shots slightly overexposed, with them proving not to be needed when looking at them on the computer. Funnily enough though, the sunset didn’t really get better. Some of the clouds did, but the sun itself didn’t, hiding in clouds and then behind the pier. This shot, the first I took with the sun still fairly high, works the best. The little golden path of light to the sun being lost in the later shots. The picture itself crops out some beach on the bottom and some uninteresting sky at the top.
All in all, just two pictures to chose from really, let alone enter. At least I won’t have to wonder about not entering a better picture this time.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 10th, 2007 at 10:54 pm and is filed under About Pictures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.