Southwold Skyline

I have always been fascinated with the architecture in Southwold, particularly the white buildings and quirky rooflines along the seafront. I have long thought about creating an artistic representation of these buildings but was never quite sure how to approach it.

The summer of 2026 has been one of blue skies and almost constant sunshine - not often associated with good landscape photography. However I decided to use these conditions to create my skyline images. I wanted to capture the contrast between the sky and the white buildings, and I felt the plain blue skies gave me a lovely minimal backdrop against which I could portray the towns architecture. On the day I made these images the sky was a vibrant blue. This gave me harsh images and I decided I wanted to create something more subtle with a softer aesthetic. To do this I used the tone curves in Lightroom and eliminated all the true blacks in my images. I wanted to go for a more high key effect. I then changed the hue, saturation and luminance of the sky using the HSL sliders. This gave me a look much more in keeping with the vision I had in my head. The tones in the images are now white, pale blue and grey - colours that harmonise to create a calm mood and a pleasing aesthetic.

I used these images to create a panel of 9 squares to represent my vision of the Southwold Skyline.