Montage

The River Tyne

For centuries the River Tyne has been the life blood of South Shields, our history tells us that a “Shiel” was the name given by Saxon people to describe a line of huts or dwellings alongside a river. Having settled next to the Tyne it became an important conduit for trade before and after the arrival of the Romans and the Vikings. Virtually all of the commodities that we needed to survive were brought by boat to and from the river, our biggest export fro many years was coal, but now it is probably Nissan cars.

This montage shows in the background the “high light” in North Shields, a Victorian landmark used as a navigation aid by ships entering the harbour. At top right tourists take a river cruise out to the piers before returning to Newcastle, enjoying lunch and drinks along the way. Centre right is the lifeboat stationed at Tynemouth, and bottom right is the Valetta registered City of Nordic - all of the pictures were taken from South Shields.

The montage was made in Photoshop using a .psd template given away free as part of a set in a magazine!

Little point in trying to give you any camera details or a map link today.

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Crossing

Tyne Tunnel

Thousands of commuters use the Tyne Tunnel every day and hundreds drive from South Shields under the River Tyne at Jarrow and make their way to work in North Tyneside. I used to do it myself some years ago and hated the twice daily trip with it’s interminable queues!

However, as a Tyne Crossing it is one of the busiest, I prefer the older pedestrian tunnel where you can use a bicycle and see the old county boundaries under the river marking Durham and Northumberland.

This shot has been livened up a little in Photoshop with some radial light rays (helps cover the imperfections in the shot taken by my passenger!

Camera details: Pentax K100D, 60mm lens, 1/15 second, f5.6, iso 200

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Flower Festival

Whitburn Methodist Church

The Whitburn Festival, on the edge of South Shields, has suffered with the weather this weekend - more rain.

I had hoped to catch lots of smiling faces at the Family Fun Day in Cornthwaite Park on Saturday but when I arrived the vans were packed and ready to go, so on Sunday I returned to have a look at the Flower Festival at Whitburn Methodist Church in North Guards. The ladies who made the floral displays had done a great job using their skills to depict life events such as sunshine, rain, harvest etc. and their hospitality was very welcome on a windy afternoon.

I have used a Photoshop template to make this triptych and really I would have liked to show a greater variety of shots, but they say “less is more”.

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Faceoff

Thoughtful art

An interesting face off between the human and the metal mesh in this thought provoking work of art at Bede’s World in Jarrow.

Converted to black and white and colour toned with Photoshop.

Camera details; Pentax K100D, 28mm lens, 1/90 second, f5.6 iso 200

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Great North Dog

101 Dalmatians

Well there weren’t actually 101 dalmatians there, but there was this fellow and one or two others, well over 10,000 others to be precise.

I’m talking about the Butcher’s Great North Dog Walk, the world record setting event which takes place in South Shields every year. Yesterday thousands of dogs and their owners took part in the worlds largest (confirmed by the Guinness book of records) dog walk to raise thousands of pounds for local charities. It has featured in the Guinness Book of Records twelve times for it’s size and the amount of participating breeds, last year 10,272 dogs were entered from 154 breeds. Last year the young chap above attempted to set a world record time for a “doggy mile”, that is why he is a Great North Dog.

As for the picture I used Photoshop’s extract filter to lift him from the background of this image, and then I created a new layer and slid it underneath the extract layer. I then made the extract layer active and made a selection with the rectangular marquee and copied it to the clipboard, this was then used in Photoshop’s pattern generator directly from the clipboard to create the new background, as a final touch I added some accentuated strokes from the set of artistic filters.

Camera details (for original image); Pentax K100D, 135mm lens, 1/180 second, f13, iso 200

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