Island, sea and rocks

Island, sea and rocks #3

The story behind this image

It's 5am at Penmon Point on the eastern most point of the island of Anglesey and the sun has just risen on a cloudy summer's morning.

At this time of year the sun rises to the northeast, which from where I'm standing on a seaweed covered rock, puts it right behind Puffin Island.

I've tried this shot before, using stacked ND grad filters to try and get both the sky and foreground within the dynamic range of my camera's sensor - fat chance. In the end I had to resort to multiple conversions of the same RAW file and some HDR trickery to get a passably good final outcome. That picture is included elsewhere in this Anglesey gallery and you can look at it for comparison purposes later.

Being older and wiser this time, I didn't waste effort on using ND grads but instead I took multiple shots of the same scene, varying exposure levels until I had the both the sky and foreground exposed as I wanted them, with various wave and cloud patterns thrown in for good measure.

I could never have afforded this multiple exposure extravagance in my old film days, which you can read about here.

Back in Photoshop I selected my favourite two exposures and manually blended them together using layers and masks to make this final image.

I didn't use HDR tonemapping techniques as the sky and sea were both moving significantly which would have given a very strange tonemapped result.

Image data

Filename - island sea rocks 03.jpg

Camera - Canon 5D

Lens - 24-105mm zoom @ 24mm

Exposure - 1/3sec @ f16, ISO400

Location - Penmon Point, Anglesey

This image - 533x800px JPEG

Conversion - ACR & PS-CS2

Comments - Shutter speed chosen to slightly blur the waves.