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What a day!
Blustery winds, storm clouds wracking overhead and frequent dousings with rain all combined to give Liz and I a typical summer's day experience on the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides, just off Scotland's north west coast.
Utterly wild and utterly magnificent!
We were on the first stage of a cruise up to Iceland on the P&O liner Azura, and had berthed at Stornoway for the day to explore the island by coach.
Having taken in the usual stops at a Harris Tweed factory and whiskey distillery (complete with obligatory gift shops), we headed off to the coast to take in the scenery at Horgabost.
Horgabost is an amazing place of wild natural beauty, with a huge beach of pale yellow sand, azure seas and the mountains of Harris and Lewis in the background.
Under sunny skies, with the gorgeous colours of the sand and sea glowing in the light, you could imagine yourself in the Caribbean - but not today!
But the weather didn't bother me, in fact I welcomed the wildness, as from a photographic point of view the stormy conditions made for a much more interesting and dramatic scene.
My only problem was trying to photograph this panorama while keeping rain spots off my filters and stopping my tripod from blowing over.
I had my trusty shower cap to hand, which did its usual grand job of keeping the rain off the important bits of technology until I was ready to shoot, and to stabilise the tripod I simply pushed it down into the wet sand as hard as I could while keeping it level.
Then it was a question of waiting until the beach was clear of people and there was patch of brightness hitting the sand stretched out in front of me before uncovering my camera lens and filters (ND grad and polariser to darken the sky and enhance the colours of the sand and sea) and taking a sweep of images from one side of the bay to the other, very quickly to avoid the lighting conditions changing too much while shooting.
I just managed to finish taking the frames for this stitched panorama before the rain hit again and we had to run back to the coach for the scenic drive back to Stornoway.
A bit of a frantic shoot, and not how I usually prefer to photograph, but well worth making the effort and getting a little wet to capture such dramatic beauty.
Horgabost is definately a location I'd love to return to and spend some quality time enjoying and photographing at my own pace.
Filename - harris horgabost panorama 01.jpg
Camera - Canon 6D
Lens - 24-105mm zoom @ 45mm
Exposure - 1/8 sec @ f16, ISO100
Location - Horgabost, Isle of Harris, Outer Hebrides, Scotland
This image - 1200x261px JPEG
Conversion - Adobe Lightroom and PhotoShop CC
Comments - Panoramic image made by stitching multiple exposures
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