Photos

Carlo Catani, an Italian immigrant to Australia back in 1876, was held in very high regard by the people of Melbourne, and St. Kilda, where he lived and worked as a Civil Engineer until his death in 1918.

He did a lot of work on the Yarra River and other locations in Melbourne and after 1914 when he and his family moved to St. Kilda he got involved with the reclamation of the foreshore of St. Kilda. He designed the landscaping of the Catani Gardens, since named in his honour.

The Catani Memorial Clock Tower, shown in this shot is a major landmark of the St. Kilda area, being quite prominent on The Esplanade, close to the Gardens and beach. Catani had suggested a clock tower on the foreshore and after his death in 1918 a fund raising campaign was launched so that a suitable memorial to him could be built on the old rotunda site on the Esplanade. The tower was designed in 1930 and competed in 1932.

Much of this from: http://www.skhs.org.au/~SKHSarticles1/articles/Carlo_Catani.html and http://www.aussieheritage.com.au/listings/vic/St%20Kilda/CataniMemorialClockTower/15191

This is a very prominent feature in St. Kilda. I saw it and took a few shots of it the first day I was wandering around there. I then came back a couple of days later for a few more. I liked the composition of this one more than the others, with the balance between the tower and the palms, and the sloping walkway and brush as a bottom frame. With this angle I was able to crop out offending branches, power lines, tents from the Esplanade Flea Market, etc.

The biggest problem I had with this one was with distortion error. The tower was not perpendicular to the water on the right. To correct I tried the lens distortion tool, with little success, then I played around a bit with the crop with perspective tool, with more enjoyable results. Great tool, it turned what I considered a disaster into a decent shot.

A different point of view (from below) can be seen in the workshop.

Workflow for this shot was as follows:
Shot was taken in Raw, with a jpeg for reference (ISO 400 82 mm @f/11, 1/750)
NEF file adjusted for exposure, shadow and vignetting
Cropped with perspective
Levels – ran in auto, then tweeked for colour
Adjusted curves –for contrast
Added an overlay layer and dodged and burned with 5-20% opacity black and white brush
Added saturation layer +15 to master
Added Colour Balance Layer and selected on and tweeked sky, to better match my original memory
Saved as a tiff
Cropped, resized, reduced noise on sky selection, added a layer, inversed selection, sharpened with USM, modified sharpening with a layer mask (30-80% opacity black brush), framed and saved as a jpeg.