Golden light at Golden’s Cove

Fiona and John’s wedding on Saturday was an excuse to spend a few days in Sneem on the famously scenic Ring of Kerry.  While I only explored a fraction of the ring, detouring west to Derrynane on Monday, I still saw plenty of spectacular scenery over the weekend.  In fact, I was able to find plenty of photographic opportunities without leaving the grounds of the hotel.

We stayed in an apartment at the Sneem Hotel, where the wedding was being held.  The hotel offers its guests lovely views of Golden’s Cove, which looked to me to be a lake, but is actually coastal.

As we enjoyed the aftermath of a barbeque on Sunday I sat with friends in the bar of the hotel looking out the large windows at the setting sun casting a warm golden light over the mountains beyond the cove and thought to myself that I should really take a photograph of the scene.

Landscape photography is best done at the so-called “golden hour” around sunrise or sunset.  I knew that I was unlikely to be up early enough on Monday morning to catch the sunrise, and by the time the sun set again over the cove I would be back in Dublin, so this was really my last chance to photograph this scene.

Thankfully the weather was nice, although rain was threatening, but along with that came clouds to add interest to the sky and reflect some more of that golden sunlight.

I fetched my camera and my tripod from the apartment and made my way down towards the water.  Using matrix metering I exposed for the scene, with my focus point set on the land jutting out to the water on the right side of the frame, and squeezed the shutter.  The resultant image showed the camera was struggling with to expose for the sky, the water and the land, now in heavy shade, all at the same time.  The consequence of this was an image which looked a little unimpressive.

Having recently experimented with HDR, I had that technique in my mind and decided to try it out again for this scene, which seemed to meet the requirements of a scene which would make for a good HDR shot.  For instance there was a lot of colour visible to the human eye that the camera was going to struggle to record with the ambient light as it was, and a HDR treatment would help bring that colour out.

I locked down the camera position on the tripod, set my camera to bracket in one stop intervals from -4 stops to +4 stops around the metered exposure, and held down the shutter for the one and a bit seconds it took to capture all nine frames.

Back in the apartment that night I imported all nine frames into Aperture, used the Photomatix HDR plugin to merge five of them (at two stop intervals), and made some slight adjustments to the contrast and mid-tones of the merged image to complete the photo.  I love in particular how the sky and the water have been reproduced in the photograph, which looks much closer to the real scene than my first single exposure attempt.