Photos

Canoe Pool is a large shallow pool built for kids. It has a sandy beach area, with protected shallow water. It is situated just in front of the Newcastle Ocean Baths, on Newcastle beach.

It was completed in 1937 “for tinies”. On the bottom was featured a map of the world in pigmented cement. In the ‘60s problems with sea lice and dirty water prompted calls for the pool to be closed. In 1968 storms demolished the pool’s map. A feasibility study in 1997 to restore the map was considered by the council of the time to be too expensive. It remains as is, one of the few standalone ocean pools created specifically for children’s use, though as you can see in the shot, others do use it.

Some of this from: http://www.nswoceanbaths.info/pools/b009.htm

I first saw this pool from bluffs over Newcastle beach (please see workshop), so it was just a matter of getting down to it to get the shot. Fitting the shot in was a little problematic, with various obstructions, and actually fitting it. In the end I decided on this position with this composition, with my zoom wide open to capture the pool and the one end of the bath house. The light standard is just about centre in the shot, but my feeling was that people would look first at the pool, then see the light standard, and hopefully see it as being somewhat offset from the centre of the pool. Let me know. Thanks.

Workflow for this shot was as follows:
Shot taken in Raw with JPG reference – (ISO 250 17mm @f11, 1/250)
NEF files adjusted for exposure, shadow, vignetting, brightness and contrast
Levels – not used
Curves – S-curve for contrast
Added saturation layer +20 to master
Saved as a tiff
Resized, selected on sky and selectively reduced noise, inversed the selection, added a layer for sharpening with USM, modified sharpening with a layer mask (50% opacity black brush), framed and saved as a jpeg