I was in Brighton for most of the weekend and on Saturday I spent the afternoon running up and down the beach taking photos. I hit a bit of a creative block earlier while working on my site design and so decided to edit the best ones and get myself properly acquainted with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.

When taking these photos I was primarily concentrating on colour, texture and composition rather than any particular subjects. I wanted to avoid the clichés of Brighton (such as the piers, or beaches in the winter, like empty deckchairs and abandoned promenades. For some of the photos I’ve tried taking eye-catching elements of the beach front and stripping them of their context, making ambiguous abstract forms like the one on the right or this “landscape”.

Editing these photos this morning was the first real time I’ve used Lightroom and I’ve got to say I’m impressed. The workflow is much nicer than my previous setup of Canon software for RAW processing and Photoshop for everything else. All the essential tools are contained within Lightroom and Photoshop compatibility means that any missing are just a few clicks away. I particularly like the cropping tool as it makes it so easy to use the Rule of Thirds and the colour/tone tools are divine. I was a little confused about how to export my photos without creating HTML/Flash galleries but Dan helpfully pointed me in the direction of the Export dialogue.

View the full set on flickr

A little Flash movie I threw together while experimenting with primitives and mouse-based camera controls in Papervision3D. I was also playing about with BitmapData – all the data is loaded from this image:

The whole thing took about an hour to put together and then around 30 minutes of playing with the animation in Tweener. This movie is my second experiment in Papervision3D and is a few months old now – I’ll be uploading some of my works that haven’t seen the light of day before as I finish off the design and flesh the content of this blog out slightly.