Red Van

I have said, and others have also said, that when we travel to a place we take images that are ‘of’ that place, and we also take images that happen to be taken ‘at’ that place but are not really of that place – meaning they are images that have a life all of their own outside of the environment in which they happen to have been taken.

This one falls into that second category. It was taken at Birling Gap on the South Coast. After leaving the beach we walked up onto the Chalk Cliffs and I happened to glance inland. There was a red van on the winding road and it was one of those occasions when I knew exactly when to shoot, and what the final processed image would look like before I pressed the shutter.

Red is the real ‘stand out’ primary colour, and de-saturating all the colours other than red during processing is a very easy task. Sometimes there are the odd bits of red elsewhere in the image that need to be de-saturated, but that is easy to do by making a selection of those extraneous bits and removing the ‘red’.

All that was left was to darken the sky to add a little more atmosphere to the image – and I loved that tiny sliver of light on the far horizon just creating a little separation tonally between land and sky.

Remember to click on the image to see a higher quality enlargement.