Sustainable Fishing

30
Written by Scott K Marshall
The last of Scotland's fishing fleet (we are an island nation) rest up - constrained by the terms of the European Union Fishery Agreement. I do hope all signatory nations are as well behaved. It is a hugely contentious subject - but surely a policy which will preserve our fishing stocks for the future. The fishing industry must reduce waste and throwing of overcatch back to the sea is madness. Anyway i will jump off my environmental soapbox and get back back to the art. I have tweaked this in Lightroom and Nik Software to bring out the detail amongst the boats in what was a twilight image. I hope the tweaking is not too much - I don't personally enjoy overcooked images - enjoy hopefully.
The last of Scotland’s fishing fleet (we are an island nation) rest up – constrained by the terms of the European Union Fishery Agreement. I do hope all signatory nations are as well behaved. It is a hugely contentious subject – but surely a policy which will preserve our fishing stocks for the future. The fishing industry must reduce waste and throwing of overcatch back to the sea is madness. Anyway i will jump off my environmental soapbox and get back back to the art. I have tweaked this in Lightroom and Nik Software to bring out the detail amongst the boats in what was a twilight image. I hope the tweaking is not too much – I don’t personally enjoy overcooked images – enjoy hopefully.

30 Comments

  1. I think it’s an effective image. I could see some stock sales potential for this. I know you appreciate honesty so I will admit that this is teetering on the brink of over tweaked for me. However, I think it doesn’t topple over. The subject can take it. You would never do that with a natural landscape. Which is one of the reasons I keep coming back for inspiration.

    1. Rachael appreciated – the blog for me is about learning and what a resource of ideas blogging is – not simply by looking at other images but also in how people see them – my policy is simple and is this – Photograph what you enjoy in the best way you can (by revisiting favorite locations) and try not to be swayed by others views beyond the constructive that is 🙂

    1. Sylvia I have followed your new blog – soapboxes are fine as long it is not constant noise that drowns the argument and people soon tune out. Our challenge is to feed an increasing population. They rekon 1/3 of our weekly shop ends up in the bin – not good – so reducing waste is probab;ly agood starting point

  3. Scott, I really enjoy studying this shot because of the following elements at work: symmetry, colors, reflections perspective, background and subject matter. Very well done. Also, nothing wrong with a passionate commentary!

  4. Nice job, except I’m with Phil… you’re right on the edge of giving it an HDR effect. Given the dark sky, the bright reflections in the foreground look a bit ‘off’. Personally, I would have dialed up the brightness in the sky and/or toned it down just a hair in the water. But it’s your choice really when all is said and done.

    1. I hear you regarding the water and may review the water brightness but the sky was dominating which was my challenge. I loved the colour though and haven’t been truly able to replicate what I saw – I will almost certainly return to this subject at a different time of the day and see what I can come up with.

  5. You have to do some tweaking Scott, this is not overdone but at a quick first glance I thought it was HDR.
    I like the image along with the message.

    1. Cheers Phil I did tonemap a single image but the adjustment was too drastic so I went back in to light room and carried out isolated adjustments specifically around the boats waterline and added some contrast to the sky

  6. Until I read your text, I hadn’t noticed any tweaking, to be honest. I’m with you on ‘overcooked’ images. And is it just me, or does a ‘reduce noise’ gizmo almost always make a poor image look worse?

    1. Glad we agree on overcooking – I do like as natural as possible. As my images are mainly natural light taking by a Nikon DSLR I dont suffer too much noise – neon and night shots where the light transfers across pixels are where noise increases. This what Adobe says:

      The Noise Reduction section of the Detail tab has controls for reducing image noise, the extraneous visible artifacts that degrade image quality. Image noise includes luminance (grayscale) noise, which makes an image look grainy, and chroma (color) noise, which is visible as colored artifacts in the image. Photos taken with high ISO speeds or less-sophisticated digital cameras can have noticeable noise.

      Note:
      When making noise reduction adjustments, first zoom in on the preview image to at least 100% to see the noise reduction previewed.

      Luminance

      Reduces luminance noise.

      Luminance Detail

      Controls the luminance noise threshold. Useful for noisy photos. Higher values preserve more detail but can produce noisier results. Lower values produce cleaner results but also remove some detail.

      Luminance Contrast

      Controls the luminance contrast. Useful for noisy photos. Higher values preserve contrast but can produce noisy blotches or mottling. Lower values produce smoother results but can also have less contrast.

      Color

      Reduces color noise.

      Color Detail

      Controls the color noise threshold. Higher values protect thin, detailed color edges but can result in color specking. Lower values remove color speckles but can result in color bleeding.

      For video tutorials about reducing noise in Camera Raw, see:

      Better noise reduction in Photoshop® CS5 by Matt Kloskowski

      Lens correction and noise reduction with Adobe® Camera Raw by Russell Brown

      Photoshop CS5 – Camera Raw 6.0 by Justin Seeley

      Hope this is not too technical but the videos are worth looking at to understand the basics of why noise appears in images – which in turn goes along way to avoiding it in the first place.

  7. Great shot Scott, lovely reflections and sky and I like the desaturated look, it suits this type of subject. We can help with the fishing, by changing our tastes – move away from Cod and try Pollock instead….for example.

    1. Thats a really good point Mark our tastes determine the market – in Scotland the problem is Haddock (cod family) – we are learning with the fihing industry – the challenge is policing less scrupulous nations.My real bu bare is the waste and throwing back of overcatch – that could be addressed by landing everything and then restricting future trips – additionally that would reduce fuel use and overheads – we will see

  8. Not too much.. As for the fishing.. Cornwall depends on it but the little fishing boats that ply these waters are getting such a raw deal when it comes to quotas when all they’ve ever taken was enough to support a few families. Certainly not enough to damage the fishing stocks but the quotas are going to the big guns who have over-fished and these little two and three man boats are being told they can no longer catch the small amounts that collectively kept these small fishing villages alive. It’s all crazy as far as I can see.

    1. Yes we have definately backed our selves in to a corner – the stock will return as they are now being managed but will there still be the skilled fishermen around – I hope so – by local and fresh if you can afford too and like Mark says change our taste – even better get out of Europe and manage our own coastline and exclude foreign ships who are only interested in the harvest and not the ecology of our shoreline. (now that felt better – lol)

  9. Just the right amount of tweaking, I’d say. I do hope we can get all this fishing business sorted out properly, although I wonder how it can possibly be policed. It’s not an easy task, that’s for sure.

    1. Thanks Lorna – I liked Gunta’s comments re the light on the water against the sky – but it is a really interesting place to walk around and this wasn’t a great weather day – so I will be back.

  10. It looks pretty much like HDR. On my opinion for that particular picture that post processing is good. Nice shot and composition.

  11. Sad to say I can remember (and honest not that long ago) when the small harbours at Buckie,Banff and Macduff were stiffed with boats…..not massif monsters of today but the true Scottish Fishing boats, nor where they tied up ‘resting’ but busy unloading a catch. I think the decline hit me after a visit to Oban, three boats plus the ferry were the only working boats in port, yet three years earlier I had a host of boats creating one of those traditional colourful foregrounds to McCaigs Tower. As to tweaking…don’t even mention it, it is part of the creative process. I like it just as you show it

    1. Yes David is is tragic that a whole industry right across Britain has gone to the wall. I particularly remember Bridlington, Stonehaven and Arbroath as really busy ports – i thought Rachael hit on the nail – i wouldn’t treat a landscape in the same way – all food for thought really – enjoying the feedback tbh but confident enough in what I am happy with.

  12. Pas toujours simple de contenter tout le monde 😕
    Pour la photo, j’aime ce traitement, ni trop, ni trop peu 😉
    le parfait dosage qui débouche les ombres, et fait ressortir les couleurs et les détails 😛

  14. You know how I feel about tweaking images, Scott, anything goes, so this is just fine, I rather like what you have done here. Often, the camera does not see things the way the eyes and the brain perceive them, and tweaking is necessary to reproduce the image as you ‘saw’ it at the time. Which may or may not be what was there in reality. That is what art is after all, to enable others to ‘see’ what you ‘see’. As for the environmental aspect, I won’t even start on that, but I wholeheartedly agree with you.

    1. Thanks Sonja – I do agree with Rachael below that in some areas it has overcooked a little. My challenge was lack of light – regards fishing I know the damage even the smaller boats have done to the floors of the loch (Loch Fyne being a particularly poor example) from trawling damaging for several decades the natural habitat (which provides the food for the bottom feeders and crustaceans) – that said we know know this for definate and many lochs and inland shallow waterways are recovering fast – so lets hang on the positive 🙂

      1. Fair enough, Scott, though I imagine you must have liked what you did initially re the tweaking or you wouldn’t have put it on here 😉 I agree with others that it verges on HDR, but then, I like HDR. I don’t think it’s too in your face in this case, in fact, for me personally it is what holds it together and lends itself to the warning message that you have summarised in your description, while still being very pleasing to look at. The sky and the water are maybe not quite a realistic representation, but they unify the image which would not be the case if the sky had less contrast or the water toned down light reflections. I like the somewhat muted colouring of the boats and the dark shadows, adding to the kind of bleak and gloomy feel, and that is perhaps where I might have made a change if any, I’m not sure, by muting those further still, and the colour reflections in the water also. I would say though, that by having the boats the way they are in your image, they nicely balance against the sky and the water. It could so easily have been the case that the background is not strong enough to ‘hold the boats in’ as it where, or the other way around, where the boats end up being dominated by the sky and the water.
        To invoke specific emotions in the viewer by showing what your mind, rather than your eyes, saw at the time, with photographs that carry a strong message, I imagine to be very difficult without either a high level of prior planning and setting up, or a degree of post processing, or both.
        I am wondering if you are reaching a point where objectives other than showing the beauty of scenery and intricacies of architecture in perfection are kind of sneeking in 😉 I am curious to see where this journey is taking you 🙂

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