This private beach was closed!

Geneve Plage 

Diving Board

I had seen some great images from Geneva by a French based photographer that I follow on social media. ( Are you following me? If not please do so in links below!)

His work was quite minimalist in style which I totally relate to as mine is very similar.

Lake Geneva is a place I've never been to before and, more importantly, had no real 'iconic' or 'honeypot' locations that lots of other photographers have visited.

I was hoping to find some unique locations that I could interpret as I wished without any other outside influences.

Boy was I glad I went, as I found so much to photograph in my 3 day visit!

There is a great road that runs close to the shoreline with many small villages and ports dotted alongside.

I was able to drop down and explore each and everyone of these places at my leisure.

Some had no real photographic potential, but the majority did.

Please see my Lake Geneva Gallery on my website to see some of these places.

Some of my images were easy to take and some others much harder, such as this diving board at the beach in Geneva.

One of the great attractions for me to visit Geneva was, in fact, this diving board. Unfortunately for me when I visited, the beach was closed off!

Luckily I was able to go further away from it with a very long lens and take the image you see above. This wasn't the image I had envisioned taking though.

The one below was!! See how I got this....

This is what I had envisioned

Now, I can imagine that you might actually NOT like this composition, but my point in showing you this process is to give you a little insight into how I plan images to look.

It is very rare for me to just turn up at a location and shoot the first thing I see. I can 'see' some great options normally quite quickly, but I will spend some time tweaking the composition until the image I like reveals itself.

Moving my camera slightly left or right as well as up and down will, invariably, improve the composition.

This image of the diving board was different.

I had seen some images online that were taken from inside the private bathing beach from the other side to mine. The background to these was open sea and sky and this is what I had intended taking as well.

Finding the beach closed created far more issues as access was now not possible. The image at the top of this article shows how 'visually complicated' the diving board had become. This wouldn't make a a clean minimalist composition without a great deal of post production work!

I had to think of the simplest and quickest way I could create the image in my mind.

There wasn't a quick option unfortunately!

I had to take away ALL of the background of Geneva in order to replicate the image I had wanted to take from the beach by the side of the diving board!

The post production involved me working on Photoshop for over 1 hour deleting the background! Whilst it doesn't really reflect the image I had in my mind before leaving home, it is still a very good composition.

What do you think?

Let me know here