The Photo

I just wanted to submit a shot before I go away on holiday
This was taken back in October, at Guincho, the coastline to the east of Lisbon.
The light was particularly beautiful that evening, there was a pink quality that you can see in the spray of the water.

I'd been hopeful all day that the clouds would provide me with interesting skies, but I was really surprised to see that a lenticular cloud had formed over the hilltop of Sintra. I've seen many pictures of them before, but never actually been lucky enough to witness one. A friend who lives locally tells me that they do occasionally appear here, but as I said, this is the first time I've ever seen one there.
Sadly, I couldn't get any more of it in the composition without including the coast itself, which has some rather ugly buildings on it.

Technique

The main problem with this shot was the intensity of light coming in from the left, and the huge amount of spray in the air.
Many of the shots were ruined with highlights clipping in the water to the left, but I wanted this particular composition with the cloud and the rock being painted red by the sun's last rays.
In terms of exposure, I took a spot reading from the rock for my base exposure, and then a reading from the sky to determine how much filtering to use. I didn't want to use too strong a filter as I didn't want the top right corner to get to dark as that was where the most interesting part of the sky is. Again, this meant having parts of the left of the sky very close to clipping highlights.
In short, this was a tricky one to expose for...It got easier later on after the sun had gone down, but then the light on the white of the water and the rock was less attractive, and the lenticular cloud had dispersed.

Post Processing

I cropped a little off the left (clipped highlights) and the bottom (you could see a rock which I felt interfered with the balance of the shot).
Adjusted the vibrancy and contrast of the RAW file, opened in PS and boosted mid-tone contrast. Finally, it was resized and sharpened for the web.

Metadata

Taken at Guincho, Portugal
Nikon D80 | Sigma 10-20mm | Nikon Cable release
Manfrotto 190XProB w/ 322RC2 ballhead
Lee 0.6 (2 stop) hard GND | Hoya Pro 1 polarizer
1 second | f22 | 10mm