The Photo

This is my new favourite beach on Portugal's south west coast.
I was down there a few weeks ago exploring the coastline on an evening when the light and the sky were particularly fine.

It's a beautiful place, one I'll be returning to again and again over the next couple of years, so you'll be seeing more from here, and probably more from this session.
It was a lovely evening...the kind where you can't resist doing "just one more shot" and I worked my way along this line of rocks, gradually getting wetter and wetter.....good, heavy duty sandals are great for this kind of thing..

As it turned out, this was the last time I ever went out shooting with my D80, so it's kind of the camera's swan-song.

Technique

It was the moss on the rocks facing the light that caught my eye when I was looking for elements to build a composition around, and the pink cloud that the wind was slowly twisting into a corkscrew shape.

I wanted a shutter speed of around a second, as the water was moving relatively slowly, and I wanted a little blur, but still plenty of shape and definition in the water.
The sun hadn't quite set, so I used a Lee 2 stop glass ND filter, combined with a small aperture, to get the shutter speed I wanted.

The sky was around 5 stops brighter than my base exposure, so I used a 3 stop Lee ND graduated filter to reduce the exposure there and ensure plenty of colour and contrast.

For this shot I had the tripod in the water with two of the legs wedged behind small rocks to prevent the waves from moving it during the exposure. I timed shots by taking one exposure as the wave was rising up the beach, one when the water was at it's peak, and another as it receded using a cable release.

Post Processing

First of all I cropped the shot into a square. It was originally landscape format, but the water to the left and rocks to the right didn't add anything at all to the composition.
I increased the colour temperature a little, as it was a little blue, and then made subtle adjustments to the vibrancy, colour and levels of the RAW file.
After that, the shot was exported into Photoshop, 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 | Lee 0.6 (2 stop) glass ND
1.5 seconds | f22 | 10mm