Catching up - a favourite photo

PMac Imagery flickr-0944, originally uploaded by PMac Imagery.

A week or so ago I did the o dark hundred thing, crawled out of bed far to early and tried to catch some sunrise photos. In a way the morning was a complete disaster. It was cold, wet, cloudy and basically a disaster.

But a little experimentation yielded some great results and in the end it was all worth it.

First, I acknowledge this long exposure thing is a little of a photo fashion thing and I'm hardly being original but still, standing on the shoulders of giants is a well established artistic traditions and who am I to ignore that? Anyway, while a bleak, grey morning was a disaster for the shots I had planned its ideal for this sort of work.

That said, to get this right you need looooong exposures and with the sun rapidly rising I was running out of options. I had a pretty weak ND filter (3 stops) but I found combining that with a circular polariser (another 2 stops of light gone), going to f 22 I was able to really stretch the frame out for 15 seconds. Not the minutes required to give the really solid milky sea some can produce but on the other hand this middling long exposure and CP also gave me the ability to play around and after a couple of goes I was able to generate this.

While I have certainly boosted the blue, the base colour is pretty much as I caught it. But even more interesting was the slight 'see through the water' effect that the polariser gave me adding some real interest in the water.

Its not going to win any prizes but you know what, I'm really proud of this one and I hope you like it.