I'm going through some of older shots in my gallery and re-editing them. On this shot I've removed the noise from the sky, cleaned a few dust spots, boosted the mid-tone contrast and given it better sharpening. It's now how I wanted it to be when I first edited it a year and a half ago.
Apologies to people who've seen it before.

Location

This was shot in Lagos, in Southern Portugal on a recent photography trip there.

I went primarily to shoot sunrises, and on a couple of the days I was blessed with some beautiful cloud formations and colour in the sky.
This particular shot was taken on the 3rd dawn, and the sky stubbornly refused to co-operate, staying clear all night and throughout the morning.

I decided to try to work something different to the other days by getting some extremely long exposures to smooth out the ocean and try to give it the same texture as the the sky.

Technique

This shot was taken a few minutes after the sun had risen above the horizon, I shot facing south along the beach as the sun's first rays were illuminating the cliff face with beautiful warm light, really bringing out the red in the rock.

I was standing in the water with my tripod on the rocks that are visible just below the water line in the foreground. The waves were very small, and I was hoping that the long exposure would make the sea more glass-like than misty (which is what would have happened with a rough ocean).

I wanted to shoot at around f8 or f9, as the lens really performs better in the middle of it's aperture range. The spot meter reading came from the cliffs and I used that as my mid tone value, setting the shutter speed accordingly.
I composed the shot (because I knew I wouldn't be able to see through the viewfinder with all the filters on) and zoomed in to 12mm to avoid vignetting.

I first added a polarizer to reduce the reflection bouncing off the water, and then I put on the 10-stop neutral density filter. Then I tried to put the grad filter on that would hold back the sky's exposure and stop it from blowing out the highlights there.
This was tricky because I couldn't see through the viewfinder and I had to turn the filters at an angle to get them to run along the top of the rocks. If they were too low, the rocks would be darkened and lose the warm light, too high and there would be a big white gap between the top of the rocks and the part of the sky covered by the filter.

The only way to do it was trial and error really, so I took a shot, adjusted the filter, took another, moved it again, until I was happy with the results on the LCD screen.

Finally I set a proper exposure by opening the shutter 12 more stops (the polarizer is 2 stop and the ND is 10 stop) 10 stops gave me 30 seconds, so I estimated the extra 2 stops needed would be around 2 minutes.

I used the remote shutter release to open the shutter, timed 2 minutes, closed the shutter...and waited to see what the LCD would show me

Notice on the beach there's the ghost of a person (another photographer as it happens) who was moving around the beach during the time the exposure was made.

Post Capture

Again, I'm trying more and more to avoid doing any post capture work at all (because I'm pretty lazy when it comes to sitting infront of a computer playing with photos) and this has had nothing changed to it apart from cloning a few sensor dust spots, adding the frame and title, re-sizing and very subtle sharpening.
Colour temperature was set in camera at 6100K and everything else, the colour, contrast and saturation is exactly how it came out on the RAW file.

Metadata

Taken on Praia do Camilo, Lagos, Algarve, Portugal
Nikon D80 | Sigma 10-20 | Nikon cable release
Hoya Pro1 Polarizer | Hoya ND400 | Lee 0.9 Hard ND grad (3 stop)
Manfrotto 190XProB w/ 322RC2 ballhead
125 seconds | f9 | 6100k

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