Dawn at Sandycove

I found myself having not a lot that I had to do this past weekend, so having had a lazy Saturday around the house, I decided to get up early on Sunday and head out with my camera for some dawn photography.    So at 6.45am the alarm went off and by 7.30 I was heading out in the car with my camera and tripod, not sure of where to go, but knowing I would head to the coast.

I ended up on the coast road from Dun Laoghaire and the first place I came to was Sandycove strand.  I parked the car, wandered up along a road between a few houses and came out at a place I’ve never been, but heard much about – the Forty Foot.  It is Dublin’s most famous swimming spot, and yesterday it had a steady stream of early morning swimmers taking a dip.

Conscious of the camera hanging over my shoulder I moved a little further on along the rocks to put some distance between me and the swimmers and stopped at a slipway that runs down to the sea.  For some reason the slip way had a yellow dashed line painted down its centre and the line continued on some of the rocks near the end of it.  The tide was coming in, but there was still plenty of rock exposed, so I found myself a place to set up my tripod and camera, and set about looking for a photograph in the scene in front of me.

The light was awfully flat, with little to be seen of the rising sun, and none of the early morning glow in the sky I was hoping for.  I began to think that my early morning rise would be in vain.

Because the tide was coming in there was quite a bit of movement of the water, so I started playing with slow exposures to try to achieve a look I often see in magazines and competitions for these types of scenes where the rocks are nice and sharp and the water running over them is soft and velvet-like.  Because of the movement of the tide, the slow shutter speed will smoothen the water like this, and with a camera on a tripod, and so not moving throughout the exposure, everything else stays sharp.  It’s possibly a bit of a clichéd look, but I like it.

My first problem was that I was facing west east (oops!) – into the (undramatic, but relatively bright) sunrise.  Actually by now the sun was well up, but only barely breaking through the clouds.  The camera therefore wanted a quick shutter speed, so I had to do a couple of things to slow it down.  Firstly, I put my ISO as low as possible.  On the D300 this meant setting it to Lo -1, which corresponds to ISO 100.  That would get me a shutter speed twice as long as an ISO 200 shot.

Next I closed down my aperture as much as it would go – with my 17-50mm lens I was able to go all the way to f/32.  Not the sweetest spot of the lens – generally it’s good to avoid extremes of aperture like this – but that got my shutter speed to 4 seconds.  Enough to start smoothing out the water.  And a nice benefit was that it would keep the frame in focus from front-to-back.  Always good for a landscape shot.

Not happy with the flat light I took a shot which, while technically good, just didn’t do anything for me.  Unless the light changed dramatically I was going to have to come up with something else to get any decent shots out of my early-morning expedition.

So I tried a few things. The first technique, the result of which you see here, was to make a HDR composite by taking the same shot again but at a number of different shutter speeds so that the scene was underexposed by 4 stops, the 2 stop, and over exposed by 2 stops.  Combining these three with a proper exposure gave me four frames to merge in post processing.

When I got home I imported the RAW files into Aperture, used Photomatix to merge them, and was very pleasantly surprised with the image that came back.  This unprocessed HDR file itself needed a little processing and I opted for a cool colour temperature to bring out a little colour in the sky and the sea.

You can see clearly the yellow paint on the exposed rocks, which continues that dashed line from the slip way on which I was standing.  I’d love to know what they are there for, and although I toyed with the idea of trying to remove them from the frame, I decided in the end that they add to the shot, though I did desaturate the yellow a little.

Having got this shot, it was time to face the other direction and try some other techniques to make something of the flat light.  More on that tomorrow.