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Of course, visiting Northern Ireland's Antrim coast wouldn't be complete without a trip to see the fabled Giant's Causeway.
Situated on the north facing part of the coast, this is an ideal location for summertime dawn or dusk photography, which is why Liz and I decided to spend a few hours here in the late afternoon, with a pause for a meal and then a contemplative session watching the sun set over the famous hexagonal basalt columns.
Well the scenery was stunning, and the sun played ball, setting nicely just in the right spot and with just the right amount of cloud to take the edge off the brightness.
But even so, getting this photo proved to be very tricky, as I wanted to get as close to the breaking waves as possible for my foreground interest.
This resulted in a lot of slippy moments on the polished basalt before I managed to wedge my tripod moderately securely in place.
Then I had the problem of blowing spray coating everything with a fine salty mist, especially tricky as I was having to use a 3 stop ND grad filter to reduce the brightness of the sky to level where I could record detail in the black basalt colunms as well.
Still, we didn't come all this way to be defeated, so I kept wiping and photographing as the sun dropped lower and lower, with image being the best of the sunset bunch.
I especially like the golden highlights as stray sunrays caught the edges of the basalt hexagons.
Just wonderful!
Filename - giants causeway 01.jpg
Camera - Canon 5D
Lens - 24-105mm zoom @ 24mm
Exposure - 1/4sec @ f22, ISO100
Location - Giant's Causeway, County Antrim, Northern Ireland
This image - 533x800px JPEG
Conversion - ACR & PS-CS2
Comments - ND grad filter used to control tonal range.
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