A few kilometres south of Europe's most Westerly point, Guincho is an incredibly wild place. The waves and wind that have travelled across the Atlantic ocean first meet the land here, and conditions for photography are quite challanging.

First of all, the wind is so strong that it shakes your tripod, and the spray from the waves covers filters and lenses on every exposure.
Also, the rocks are really really sharp. A fall here really hurts as I know from painful experience.

I drove out to Guincho hoping to catch a sunset, but sadly around 30 minutes before the sun went down, the clouds cleared and left me with what I am beginning to think of as a "typical Portguese sunset", no clouds, just a few minutes of intense colour on the horizon as the sun disappears.

I was blessed with great conditions though, there was little wind and the tide was low, so I could get out to some of these pools and capture them as the ocean ran in and out of the rocks.
Of course, you can never be too careful with the tide, and even though I was keeping an eye on the waves to make sure I didn't get cut off, there we was a point when with my eye against the viewfinder, a wave came in at waist height and drenched me.
Fortunately I had a good grip on the camera and nothing was lost. I've learned that whenever I go to the coast to shoot, to always take a change of shoes and socks in the car.

This shot was captured just after the sun dipped below the horizon. I wanted a really long exposure, so I used a Hoya ND400, which gave me 9 more stops. Usually I wouldn't use this in such low light, and it did result in me losing shadows in the bottom right corner, but I really wanted to get the sea looking as misty as possible, and with the filter I could get a 90 second exposure with the aperture at f11.
I also wanted to darken the sky a little to balance the exposure, so I used a 2 stop blue graduated filter to enhance the blue already in the sky.

This photo has been kicking around on my hard-drive for a month or so now. I wanted to go back and shoot it better without the lost shadows, but every time I've been back, the weather and tide has been too strong to allow me to get to the same location.

I'm submitting it because I do still like the shot a lot, although I am fully aware that it is technically flawed.

Taken in Guincho, Portugal
Nikon D80 | Sigma 10-20mm | Nikon cable release | Hoya ND400 filter | Cokin 2 stop blue graduated filter
f11 | 90 seconds | 10mm
Shot RAW, complete workflow (saturation, contrast and crop) in Apple Aperture
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A couple of people have mentioned that they think this shot is over-sharpened.
It has infact had VERY LITTLE sharpening due to the noise from long-exposure. The jagged edges around the rocks were in the original RAW file which I have uploaded to scraps with no work other than JPEG conversion and resize [link]
I'm not sure why the rocks appear this way: They are very sharp rocks, although it could also be the cameras noise reduction facility.
But please, no more comments saying I've over-sharpened it