Beach sunset long exposure

tobers

I've been wanting to try some long exposure sunset shots of the sea and beach after seeing some of the cracking pics on here. I managed to sneak away from the family for an evening during our holiday in Cornwall last week.

I used manual mode and for the pic below ended up with a 25 sec exposure at f14. I'm using a 30D with a 17-55 lens by the way. I had many "failed" shots. My super Giottos carbon fibre tripod is excellent, but when the waves wash the sand from under the legs it doesn't help image quality much. I also spent a long time trying different shutter speeds and aperture options, and forgot about getting the composure spot on.

Anyway, an excellent way to spend an evening, especially as there was a pub on the beach front for afters




Any thoughts & C&C welcome.

Cheers!

Tobers

chopsky

Nice pic man. Like the colours.

Just a few things:

Firstly, it's a pity the little mountain there is a bit of a silhouette. Would have been nice to have it properly exposed. The whole picture looks slightly underexposed come to think of it. Im thinking you should have metered off the ground instead of looking at the sky.

Secondly, straighten the horizon please.

And thirdly, yeh, it's quite evident the composition could have been improved upon, but you've already noted that so next time you'll get that right It's a little bit right-heavy at the moment. Almost feels to me like the photo is tilting left.

That's my 2c...take it. leave it. do what you want with it.
personally, I'd take it...but I always take my own advice.

Hikin' Mike

Definately straighten out the horizon! You could blend two photos (or the same) and lighten up the details a bit using Photoshop.

Nice job, though!

tobers

Thanks for the tips. I've looked at the pic again and strightened the horizon (again - I was only out 0.2 degrees from the previous attempt). I also re-did the levels. I had overdone the contrast rather badly killing the detail in the shaded rocks.

Basically, I admit it was crap composition due to late arrival on site and not enough time to scout for the best location. There - I've said it now .

Still, interesting exercise and now I know what to watch out for I'll be trying a few more of these.

pyrtek

chopsky wrote:

Im thinking you should have metered off the ground instead of looking at the sky.

That's going to the other extreme. You will never get a nice sky like that if you
meter off the ground. It would be all washed out and colorless. Two ways to
get around this problem are a grad ND filter or combining exposures. I still like
the slightly dark ground in this picture, though.

chopsky

pyrtek wrote:

That's going to the other extreme. You will never get a nice sky like that if you
meter off the ground. It would be all washed out and colorless. Two ways to
get around this problem are a grad ND filter or combining exposures. I still like
the slightly dark ground in this picture, though.

True. The only way to really shoot a photo like this is with a grad ND filter though. Can't say I'm a big fan of HDR's myself. They're usually poorly implemented.

tobers

Yep - I had an ND grad on it which sorted the sky, but couldn't do enough to allow me to fix the dark area on the right. There's still detail in there which Photoshop can bring out but it just looks a bit wrong.

Compositionally it sucks due to that dark bit, but now I know

LiquidAir

chopsky wrote:

True. The only way to really shoot a photo like this is with a grad ND filter though. Can't say I'm a big fan of HDR's myself. They're usually poorly implemented.

Automated exposure blending have rarely worked out well for me, but I have gotten good results by imitating an ND grad with two exposures. I just layer the exposures and use a mask to create the grad profile I want. This shot is actually a prime candidate for that approach because of the very bright strip along the horizon. You can buy strip ND grads, but that is a rather specialized piece of gear.