Come Watch the Sun Sink Away...*

After attending the premiere of 'The Insatiable Sun' I had a few days away in North Yorkshire visiting Scarborough, Whitby, Bridlington and surrounding places. The first two days were damp and cold so photography was limited to a few snapshots for future reference. Despite the rain, the iconic pier at Whitby had a goodly number of visitors so even a rainy black and white shot was out of the question. No matter... we were having a great time. 


The final day was completely different, weather-wise. Bridlington with its harbour and long sandy beaches was the target and by late afternoon is was pretty clear that a half-decent sunset might be had. I took a few pictures around the harbour before wandering along the sand to the south of the town. Strolling along the sand was really nice collecting pebbles and shells, keeping a close eye on the sun and taking a few pictures.Walking back towards the harbour I took photographs of  some beach huts and a bicycle. Here's the images:

Click the image for the bigger picture

Click the image for the bigger picture

Both were quite difficult pictures because of the tricky exposures involved. Elements has helped a little particularly with the bicycle picture. The sea and sky in this image was pretty much burned out but adding a graduated filter in ACR5 helped initially with selections on the sky and sea lifting out the highlights. I also like the composition of the bicycle shot; it almost conforms to the Law of Thirds - at least horizontally! The image is cropped to 5x5.


Please feel free to comment.




*The Magic Hour - Andrew Peterson from the Album "Counting Stars"

The Photographers Ephemeris

I'm a sucker for sunsets, I really am and there's lots of places I'm getting to know where, given the right conditions, some spectacular ones can be seen. My current favourite locations are West Kirby on the Wirral peninsular and the west coast of Anglesey from Llanddwyn to Tywyn Fferam. There's lots of places to discover, too. I'm planning a trip to the Jurassic coast of Dorset, the north Devon coast and to see and photograph the wooden lighthouse at Burnham on Sea in Somerset probably in May.


One of the best tools I've found for planning such adventures is The Photographers Ephemeris. This little tool allows you to plot sunrise and sunset times for just about any location in the world. It's superbly accurate; I put it to the test a couple of weeks back on Anglesey when it plotted the sunrise at Beaumaris perfectly. There's two versions: a desktop one, which is free, and an iPhone app, which is £5.49 (UK). Once you've got a copy of the program or app start it up and search for a location. When it finds where you're after it drops a pin that can be moved to the optimum location. Yellow and blue 'beams' are projected showing the sunrise and sunset on the yellow axis and moonrise and set on the blue one complete with times. You can fix the date to any point in the year.


There's all sorts of other calculations such as elevation above sea level, azimuth and altitude of the sun or moon for any time of daylight and it will even find when the sun/moon will appear from behind a hill! It's invaluable for the landscape photographer. All I now need to complete my landscape kit is a nice set of Lee ND grad filters!


You can get TPE by clicking below:

http://photoephemeris.com/

To round off this post, here's a West Kirby sunset from last winter. As always, ACR5 was used to process the image before final tweaking in Elements and a 5x5 crop, a format I'm liking this more and more...

Click the image for the bigger picture

Holiday Homes 2

Click the image for the bigger picture!

Anglesey... a late August sunset at Tywyn Fferam on the west coast of the island.

I'd only just arrived on the island for the weekend when this stunning sunset presented itself. A quick dash up the coast to another favourite location and the fastest setup ever to snatch a few shots from the headland overlooking the beach. No filters were used and just a tad of under exposure with the merest tweak of the saturation in Photoshop Elements.