“…something good to die for
To make it beautiful to live”

Go With The Flow – Queens of the Stone Age

The Photo

Another shot taken from the same session in south west Portugal that I took my last submission [link]
This was the last shot I took before packing up, by this point I was pretty wet and cold as I’d been standing up to my knees in the Atlantic for 30 minutes.
It was a beautiful evening though, the kind when I feel really lucky to have taken up photography, really lucky to be standing there with nothing else filling my mind but the sky and waves and the ocean infront of me.
When it’s like this, then it really feels like a blessing just to be out there.

The Photo

I spent the session working my way along the rocks, building compositions around the different rocks and trying to capture the movement of the water over and between them.
For exposure, I took a reading from the lit part of the rocks, and then a reading from the sky, to see how much filtering I needed.
For more information on how I measure exposure for graduated filters, have a look at this article here [link]
I used a 3 stop neutral density filter to balance the exposure of the sky and the foreground, and a tripod wedged between the rocks to ensure that the camera didn’t move as the waves moved around the legs.

Post Processing

Minor adjustments to the vibrancy, colour and levels of the RAW file before exporting into Photoshop CS3, where it was sharpened and resized for the web.

Metadata

Taken on Praia do Amoreira, Costa Vicentina, near Aljezur, Algarve, Portugal
Nikon D80 | Sigma 10-20mm | Nikon Cable release
Manfrotto 190XProB w/ 322RC2 ballhead
Lee 0.9 (3 stop) hard GND
1 second | f11 | 10mm

Workflow in Apple Aperture and Photoshop CS3