After living on the welsh coast, and being obsessed with walking on the beach in winter, I admit I have a moody coastal aesthetic. I love the darker days when you can wrap up warm, smell the sea on the wind and hear the waves roaring. Compared to golden sun summers with sand in your toes, you can not beat it.
Why the Moody Aesthetic
I love the beach at all times of the year, as you may have seen in my previous posts. And a little obsessed with taking pictures of the local landmarks, mainly the most famous and iconic Mont-Saint-Michel.
Summer brings the gorgeous weather and along with it droves of tourists, meaning that walks on the beach are often an obstacle course of sunbathers, children running, and people playing various sports, not ideal for taking “aesthetic” photographs.
This is one of the main reasons I love the beach in late autumn and winter. It is quiet, empty, and usually excessively moody. The weather turns on a dime from blue sky to torrential rain, the waves swelling dramatically offshore.
Editing the Mood
Not all days are my perfect moody beach day, so to create them to be my perfect day I go to Adobe Lightroom.
A moody scene is usually associated with cooler tones, darker lights, and flatter darks. Low contrast, low light, low saturation. In other words, keep it low.
In some of my edits I like to play on the complimentary sides of the colour wheel. In particular red and aqua. as you can see on the right-hand side image. The left-hand side being a blue muted edit.
Presets
For this set of presets, I mainly played with the basic adjustments and colour, trying to capitalise on what I already had in the raw image. Shooting on a full-frame camera in .CR (canon raw) files, meaning that I have more room on exporting the image to JPEG.
Nowadays, with the growth of technology, phones have the capability of shooting raw files, so using Lightroom mobile on the go with your raw images is even easier. That and being able to sync your presets from your desktop to your phone of course!
To get these presets and more, click the link below!
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