The Photo

Out on the west coast of Portugal near Lisbon is the most westerly point in continental Europe. Just near here is a beach called Guincho which I have photographed lots of times before. In the summer months, when the sunset is at it’s most westerly, it’s a great place to shoot as the coastline there is very rocky and dramatic.

It’s about an hour to drive there from Lisbon, and in the summer in Lisbon the skies are almost always cloudless throughout the entire summer, so setting off to the coast, it’s impossible to know what conditions you’re going to get.
More than half the time I get there and find the seas benign and the skies clear, and other times it’s so windy, with so much spray coming off the sea that it’s impossible to shoot.
Throughout last summer, I wasn’t happy with a single image I captured there, but this spring I traveled there a number of times and got some beautiful conditions for photography.
My last submission [link] was taken there in early June, but this shot dates back to March of this year.

It had been stormy all day, and checking the tide tables ([link] A really useful site. If you use Mac OSX you can download all the low/high tide times for a particular area of coast onto iCal, or simply use it as a Dashboard widget) told me that the tide would be retreating, which is a good time to shoot coastal waterscapes.

When I arrived there a storm was just clearing as the sun set, and the great black clouds were starting to break up.

Technique

There’s a particular rock on this beach which slopes all the way down to the sand. It’s a great place to shoot from as you can choose exactly how close you get to the water, and it’s also covered in barnacles and sea weed which give it this great texture. It does get it’s fair share of waves though, so I always end up with wet feet here.

The waves were quite heavy, so I wanted to use a shutter speed that was fast enough to keep some movement in the water…around half a second is usually a decent exposure time for this. I took a meter reading from the rock infront of me for my base exposure, happy that there was a small enough range of contrast in the foreground to avoid losing shadow detail or clipping highlights. With an aperture of f13 I could get a shutter speed of half a sec ond, which would give me the movement in the water that I wanted.
I then metered the sky to see how much brighter it was than my base exposure, and what ND grad filter I’d need to use. The sky was around 5 stops brighter so I decided to use a 3 stop grad to maintain lot’s of contrast and atmosphere in the sky.
There’s more information on metering and filtering here [link]

In terms of compostion, I wanted to use the foreground rock to create a line that led to the next rock and onto the third rock going towards the horizon.
With shots like this, sometimes it works better to shoot the waves when they are receding, sometimes it works better to shoot them when they are coming towards you. In this case, I tried to capture the waves as they broke around and over the surrounding rocks, and this shot had the water movement that I liked best from all the images I took.

Post Processing

The image was captured in RAW and then given small tweaks in contrast and vibrancy in Aperture. I then imported the file as a PSD into PS and gave the image a further midtone contrast tweak (great tip picked up from *jjuuhhaa [link])

I then converted to Lab Colour, resized the image to 1500 pixels wide using Bicupic Smoother, sharpened the image, and then final resized to 800 for the web, before converting the image back to RGB colour.

Metadata

Taken in Guincho, Cascais, Portugal
Nikon D80 | Sigma 10-20mm | Nikon Cable release
Manfrotto 190XProB w/ 322RC2 ballhead
Lee 0.9 (3 stop) hard GND
1/2 sec | f13 | 10mm

Workflow in Apple Aperture and PS