The Photo

This is Praia da Ursa, (Bear beach) in Sintra, about an hour’s drive west of Lisbon. Various Portuguese deviants have shot here and it’s been on my list of locations to shoot for a while.

Sadly it’s been a pretty poor summer in Portugal for landscape photography. The skies have been clear blue every day and on this day I set off more in hope than expectation as there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. I thought I’d at least scout the location and find some places to shoot from. I got there in plenty of time, but on my way down the cliffs, followed the wrong path and ended up above a 10m sheer drop to the beach. So I scrambled my way back up the cliffs and chose another path….and again finished just short of the beach.
It was frustrating because the light was fantastic and I could see that the beach was a great location with various different shooting angles.
By now I was pretty worn out as it was very hot, I’d been scrambling up and down almost sheer cliffs with a lot of camera gear on my back, as well as plenty of water, so I worked my way half-way up the cliff again, sat down, drank around a half a liter of water and thought about what to do next.
The light was fading and some clouds had amazingly appeared above the middle of the beach (the only clouds anywhere in the sky), and I knew that even if I got the right path this time I’d be so rushed trying to find a place to compose a shot that I’d probably miss the best light…so I decided to look for a spot near to where I was resting, try to compose a shot from the cliff side and wait for the light to peak.

At the end of the session, I knew I would be returning to this beach again, it really is a beautifu wild place…and incredibly difficult to access. Later in the year, as the sun moves to the south (left in this picture) it will illuminate the faces of the rock columns that can be seen from the beach better, so I’m looking forward to going back there…and this time actually getting down to the beach.

As it turned out this is the ONLY session of landscape photography I have done for the entire summer, since early June, and this is the ONLY shot I have from that session that I’m happy with…so this is the only landscape photo I’ve done in the last 3 months…I know it's far from perfect, but as I said, it's all I've managed this summer.
Autumn will start soon though, and the conditions should be better then.

Technique

The range of brightness in this shot was very very high, and as a result this is the first time I’ve ever had to blend two exposures to get the effect I wanted.
While the sun was still in the sky, the only option was to shoot along the cliff with it out of the frame. While it was possible to hold back the sky with filters, the harsh glare bouncing off the water was impossible to control.
After the sun had set, I was able to get the composition I wanted, with the whole of the beach framed by rock formations on each side.
When the light and colour were at their peak I metered from the foreground and then reduced the exposure by one stop, as I didn’t want the foreground to be too bright. I then metered the sky, which was around 7 stops brighter than my foreground exposure, so I used two ND grad filters (a 3 stop and a 2 stop) to hold the sky back.
At f8, this gave me a 1 second exposure, which wasn’t long enough to get the water looking smooth. Closing down the aperture would have given me a few more seconds, but I wanted at least 30 seconds, so I decided to use a Hoya ND400 9 stop ND filter.
I removed the grad holder (which already had the grads lined up in the correct place) and screwed in the ND400. Then I replaced the grad holder with the grad filters and set the camera to Bulb.
Adding 9 stops gave me a shutter time of 2 minutes at f8, so I opened the shutter with a cable release and sat back and waited.

(For more information on grad filters and long exposure, please have a look at these articles in ND Magazine [link] )

During the exposure, I noticed the light levels dropping, so I added around half a minute more to try to get enough light in. Longer than that and the files from my D80 start to get very noisy, which can be dealt with, but only with a subsequent loss of detail and sharpness.
After the exposure I noticed on the LCD that the foreground had underexposed, and the exposure was around a stop darker than the test shot I’d done at f8 and 1 second because of the fading light during the long exposure.

I really needed a good 3 stop straight ND filter for this shot…it would have meant I didn’t have to use the ND400 and be restricted to only one shot when the light was at it’s best.

Post Processing

I shot in RAW and processed the file in Apple Aperture giving small adjustments to contrast, saturation and vibrancy. I tried various techniques to lift the shadows from the foreground, but everything gave me too much noise and a loss of saturation and contrast, so I decided to blend the image with the foreground of the test shot I’d done before the long exposure. As I said, it’s the first time I’ve ever blended two exposures, and I used a tutorial that Dave =Sun-Seeker wrote [link]
In his tutorial he describes using the same RAW file, whereas I used 2 different files shot moments apart.
After I’d blended the images, I used Neat Image to reduce the noise in the sky and shadows, and then resized to 1500 pixels. I then added some sharpening, before reducing again to 900 pixels and adding the title.

Metadata

Taken in Praia da Ursa, Sintra, 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) hard GND | Hoya ND400
143 seconds | f8 | 10mm

Workflow in Apple Aperture and PS