Cawood Flooding
Well, that's really annoying. I just spent half an hour writing this on the (now free!) wifi connection on a National Express East Coast train back up to York, and one wrong click of the mouse and it evapourated into the ether! Oh well, try again!
It's been a while since I last posted, mostly because I haven't had much time. A large part of this has been due to the flooding of the river Ouse. We live in Cawood, between York and Selby, and last week the Ouse burst its banks and flooded the area on the other side of the river to the village, known as Kelfield Ings. Whilst this may look pretty, it means that the road we normally use to get between Cawood and York has been under about 8 feet of water. Journey's have to be made via Selby, significantly increasing the journey time. I'm getting the train down south a couple of times a week at the moment, but Jenny has to do this every day to get to work, and unfortunately the local bus service has become rather erratic as a result. Still at least we weren't flooded, unlike some people, including those who've only just started recovering from last autumn's floods.
The image on the right, showing the B1222 vanishing under water, is part of a series taken the night the Ouse burst its banks. I've also a number of other shots showing how close Cawood bridge came to being swamped, and how the flood defenses kept the river out of the village (the river level was about 6 feet above Old Road, which runs along side the river).
I also took a few shots on the morning of Thursday 24th, after Kelfield Ings had completely filled with water. I haven't had time to process these fully yet, but I did have a quick experiment with the shot on the right. The aim was to take the sunrise over the flooded fields, but it wasn't particularly spectacular, resulting in some rather dull, grey images. With a little tweaking in Photoshop (rather more than the exposure correction and sharpening I normally do) I was able to produce the image on the right. There's a few issues with it - mostly the sky is blown out - but overall I think I'm pleased with it.
To produce it, I used the shadow/highlight tool to bring the grass bank on the right out of the shadows, and then applied graduated tints to the sky and foregound. These were done with a new, completely orange layer, with a gradient applied to a layer mask. I fiddled with the blending mode until I got the desired result - I think it was using colour dodge. The opacity was then changed, stronger for the sky, weaker for the foreground, until the right balance was acheived. A touch of vignetting was added using the oval selection tool on a new layer, heavily featherd, then inverted and the corners filled in black, again blended with the rest of the image to acheive the right look. A touch of dodging and burning on the sky brought out the clouds, and finally a touch of sharpening to finish things off.
When I get time, I'm going to go through the rest of the set and see if I can find a better starting image, to avoid the floating bit of grass on the lake, and the blown out sky. Or failing that, I might use the same image but edit from RAW instead of JPEG. (This is what I'd normally do, but this started as a quick experiment.)
The full set (Cawood Flooding January 2008) can be found on Flickr, and as and when I finish editing the other shots of the floods, I'll post them there too.
