Watchet Harbour 2024

This series was taken on an overcast day in the spring of 2024. Watchet is a small but busy coastal town in Somerset in the UK. I shot these as both black and white in-camera JPEGs and as regular raw files. Here are some shooting and editing notes for those who are interested.

• The camera was an Olympus PEN E-P7 with an M.Zuiko 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 pancake zoom. I like this combination because it’s compact, portable and unobtrusive. The camera has no viewfinder, which can be nuisance, but it does have a retro charm which makes it nice to handle and shoot with.

• All these black and white images are in-camera JPEGs shot with a custom black and white style with a grain effect. The E-P7 has a custom Color dial on the front for swapping to these custom styles, and they can be very effective.

• The normal advice is to shoot raw rather than JPEG so that you have more processing flexibility later. For these shots I didn’t. They are all edited JPEGs. If the camera’s own picture styles are close to your original intentions, and if the JPEGs have enough dynamic range for a little editing, I think. that’s fine.

• All of these images have one or both of two local adjustments. I like to use a graduated mask to darken the tops of skies and a radial mask to add ‘light’ to key areas of a scene.

• The in-camera grain effect works to your advantage if you have clipped highlights, like bright skies. The grain pattern ensures there’s always some texture even in overexposed skies, so it looks more natural when you darken them.