I’ve talked about doing Seascapes in Ireland for a long time on my course. Having watched some great videos from the US, I defo think this is something at lends itself really well to the Irish Coastline.
And top of my list is Mytleville: it’s close by and has some lovely rock formations which have work at any tide. Part of a good seascape is longer exposures so early / late is best and the opportunity only just came to be there on a fine evening.
This was an interesting first go at this. The main learning for me was around an ‘optimal’ shutter speed. I had kind of assumed it would be ‘the longer the better’ I have seen some very ethereal seascapes with one/two minute exposures. So I did some 30s exposure but, in this context, they turned out a bit mushy and dull. The Mytleville landscape is all about the texture of the rock and the contrast to the water and the longer exposures covered all that up. So to get some blur but still see the rocks we’re looking at more like 1 or 2 second exposures.
There’s not one answer to this and you have to think about what you want to show and what will work best – and experiment!
Then there’s timing the exposure with the waves. Again this took a bit or trial and error because as the water comes in it covers the stones on the beach you loose the texture. So how much texture, how much creamy water.
I have two versions of the shot above and I find it hard to decide which I like the balance of best:
I initially put the polarising filter on – expecting it to not only block a couple of stops of light to allow longer exposures but also to effect the reflections on the water. It did help with longer exposures at the start and I think it did pop the clouds a little but not with the movement of the water made little impact there.
And I didn’t like the longer exposures so as the light dropped it wasn’t necessary any more.
Other than that: I took the cheap tripod and old D700 in case it got wet. I managed to not drop the camera (close a few times) but the tripod definitely got wet and sandy so be prepared for that. Although I’m all for fancy, rigid tripods, I’ve learned that at times you can get away with a cheaper one if you have time and are very careful.