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| End of the Day - Sunset at Ocean Beach |
I shot this image about a week and a half ago on the first evening my friend Jay was in town. We grabbed a quick bite to eat at Southbeach so Jay could try their legendary fish tacos then took the short walk to the beach to shoot the sunset.
The beach part of Ocean Beach isn't much to write home about photographically speaking. It's more or less just a sandy beach. But just a bit south of the pier, the beach quickly turns to pock-marked sandstone. That's good news for a couple photographers looking for interesting foreground subject matter. With the sun low in the sky, the sandstone picks up an amazing golden glow. When the sun is very low (as it is in the image on the right), only the top ridges pick up that glow, creating an interesting contrast between the lit up ridges and the rest of the rock.
This is a single image, no multiple exposures or blending or even Photoshop trickery. What you see here is largely what came out of my camera. I achieved this single exposure by using my graduated neutral density filter along with a graduated blue filter. Placing the darker regions of the filters over the sky allowed me to effectively darken the sky enough to capture the sky and relatively dark foreground all in one exposure. Typically, only the graduated neutral density filter would be used for this purpose, however I've found that no matter how "neutral" the filter is supposed to be, there is still a noticeable color shift when using it. The blue graduated filter doesn't reduce the exposure by much, but it does tend to shift the colors back towards reality.
Reducing the exposure for the sky, meant using a longer shutter speed to get the proper exposure. That's something I see as a happy side effect, especially along the coast. With a quick shutter speed, the water is frozen in place, but the longer exposure allows the water to show its motion. The wispy, flowing water shown is the result of longer exposure and begins to hint at the forces of nature that shape this part of the California coast.
The beach part of Ocean Beach isn't much to write home about photographically speaking. It's more or less just a sandy beach. But just a bit south of the pier, the beach quickly turns to pock-marked sandstone. That's good news for a couple photographers looking for interesting foreground subject matter. With the sun low in the sky, the sandstone picks up an amazing golden glow. When the sun is very low (as it is in the image on the right), only the top ridges pick up that glow, creating an interesting contrast between the lit up ridges and the rest of the rock.
This is a single image, no multiple exposures or blending or even Photoshop trickery. What you see here is largely what came out of my camera. I achieved this single exposure by using my graduated neutral density filter along with a graduated blue filter. Placing the darker regions of the filters over the sky allowed me to effectively darken the sky enough to capture the sky and relatively dark foreground all in one exposure. Typically, only the graduated neutral density filter would be used for this purpose, however I've found that no matter how "neutral" the filter is supposed to be, there is still a noticeable color shift when using it. The blue graduated filter doesn't reduce the exposure by much, but it does tend to shift the colors back towards reality.
Reducing the exposure for the sky, meant using a longer shutter speed to get the proper exposure. That's something I see as a happy side effect, especially along the coast. With a quick shutter speed, the water is frozen in place, but the longer exposure allows the water to show its motion. The wispy, flowing water shown is the result of longer exposure and begins to hint at the forces of nature that shape this part of the California coast.
