“..that rare fulfilling joy when in the presence of some wonderful alignment of events.
Where the light, the colour, the shapes and the balance all interlock so beautifully…”

Charlie Waite

Location

There are times in landscape photography when everything just “works” so well it’s as if it was meant to happen, as if it’s happening just so we can witness it and photograph it.
Of course there are a lot more times when it simply doesn’t work, when the light isn’t right, the clouds are in the wrong place, it’s just not possible to get the composition to work, the tide isn’t where we want it to be, or so many of a multitude of things beyond our control.

I guess this is the attraction of landscape photography for me, the fact that it can’t be forced, it takes patience and more patience…but then when it comes together we get to witness something truly unique and beautiful, and if we’re prepared, landscape photography gives us the chance to interact and become part of it.

This is the second shot I’m submitting from an evening a few weeks ago when I drove to Carrasquira to photograph the sunsets across the estuary of the river Sado and it’s network of fishermen’s piers.
The other shot can be seen here [link]

This collapsed pier really caught my eye, and as I peered through the viewfinder trying to compose a shot around it, I noticed that the cumulus clouds above were formed into a curve that exactly mirrored the curve of the pier infront of me.
It’s those moments that give me a rush when I’m with my camera, knowing that a 250km round trip for one hour’s shooting was worth it, and I couldn’t help but smile when I clicked the shutter…

Technique

I took this shot with a 9 stop neutral density filter, which completely darkens the viewfinder when it’s on the camera, so the composition and placing of grad filters has to be done first.

Composition was limited to making sure that there was nothing touching the edges, as there were lots of pieces of wood protruding from the bottom and I wanted the edges of the frame to be as clear as possible.
I was standing on an adjacent pier, which limited my movements and where I could put the camera, but I wanted to make sure that the relationship between the sky and the pier was apparent.

I chose to use the 9 stop ND400 filter as I think that in a shot of a pier long exposures work as they smooth out the water, eliminating the visual noise of ripples and allowing the textures of the wood to become more apparent.
Before putting this on though I measured the range of exposures in the scene with the spot meter and decided to use two 3-stop neutral density filters to balance the sky with the foreground and the water.
It's important that the graduation lines of the ND grad filter are lined up along the horizon so I put the ND grad filters in place first, and then removed the whole grad filter holder with the grads still in it, before screwing in the ND400 and then putting the grads back in place.

I added 9 stops to the exposure I’d measured earlier, which gave me an exposure of 1 minute, but as the filter has a tendency to underexpose, and as there was no direct light source in the shot to blow highlights, I added another minute to make sure.

As with the other shot I submitted from here, the pier I was standing on was very rickety and moved a lot, so I sat down behind the tripod and didn’t move at all for the 2 minute exposure

Post Processing

Again, there’s very little change to this image as it appeared from the camera. I shot RAW and I’ve slightly altered contrast level, added a frame and title and resized. These are the colours I saw that evening.
I then sharpened it a little for the web.

Metadata

Taken at Carrasqueira, Alentejo, Portugal
Nikon D80 | Sigma 10-20mm | Nikon Cable release
Manfrotto 190XProB w/ 322RC2 ballhead
Hoya ND400 (9 stop) | Lee 0.9 (3 stop) hard GND | Cokin ND8 (3 stop) soft GND
118 seconds | f8 | 18mm

Workflow in Apple Aperture. Frame and title in PS