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Sunset on Llandwyn Island, Anglesey, North Wales.
I'd spent a wonderful day hiking and photographing around Anglesey, but I knew there was one place I needed to be at sunset, and that was Llandwyn, a spit of rock sticking out into the sea off Newborough beach on Anglesey's southwest coast.
Well, I wasn't disappointed, with the sun setting down into a horizon clear of clouds and the trademark Anglesey afterglow lighting up the sky.
I'd spent quite a while refining the composition shown here, moving the tripod a few inches this way, then that way, to get the curve of the beach and the sweep of the waves just as I wanted them.
My only problem with this scene was the contrast, which was way beyond what my camera's sensor could record, even with ND grad filters stacked in front of the lens.
In the end I hedged my bets and took five separate exposures covering everthing from the highlights on the horizon to the shadows on the rocks.
In post processing I first of all tried to create a 32 bit HDR file in Photomatix but that didn't work as the clouds had moved between each exposure and looked awful when combined into the HDR file.
So in the end I took two exposures that gave me the shadow and highlight detail that I wanted to show and combined them using layers and masks in PhotoShop.
I'm still not 100% happy with the result. The resulting image looks OKish at website resolution but when I view it at print resolution I can see that some more work still needs to be done on the blending.
I'll bear that in mind if I ever come to print this particular file.
Filename - watch tower 03.jpg
Camera - Canon 5D
Lens - 24-105mm zoom @ 24mm
Exposure - 1/30sec @ f16, ISO100
Location - Llandwyn, Anglesey
This image - 800x533px JPEG
Conversion - ACR & PS-CS2
Comments - ND grad filter used to moderate exposure difference between land and sky..
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