High contrast and washed out colours - not an ideal situation for landscape photography you might think.
Indeed, I had no intention of photographing this scene at Porth Dafarch on Anglesey's Holy Island under the fierce midday sun, but then some clouds appeared off shore and shafts of intense light started playing across the sea just off the cliffs flanking the beach.
This was enough for me to go get the camera, but instead of trying to capture the scene in a normal fashion, using ND grad filters or multiple exposures to mitigate the high contrast, I decided to go for a more surrealist approach and to embrace the contrast as a feature of the image's final composition, rather than take measures to reduce its intensity.
I realised that the most important element I was seeing before me was the patch of bright sunlight just off the end of the cliffs at the entrance to the bay, and if I could capture an image in such a way as to emphasise that patch of light by surrounding it with darkness then I would have achieved what I saw in my mind's eye.
Once I'd decided what I wanted, taking the actual photo was the easy part as I just had to dial in enough negative exposure compensation to render the surrounding landscape adequately dark on my camera's histogram.
Filename - sea sunlight 01.jpg
Camera - Canon EOS 5D
Lens - 24-105mm zoom @ 105mm
Exposure - 1/400sec @ f11, ISO100
Location - Porth Dafarch, Anglesey, North Wales
This image - 800x450px JPEG
Conversion - ACR & PS-CS2
Comments - -2ev exposure compensation used to enhance highlights.
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