Edit

January 27th - Updated image with a new version (increased contrast / brightness).

The Location

This piece is one of the first waterscape photographs I've taken since moving to the United Kingdom. Canterbury is a beautiful city, but one of the nicest things about it is its proximity to the coast. A 10 minute bus trip will take me to the shoreline of Whitstable and Herne Bay, while a 20 minute train trip will land me in the coastal towns of Margate, Ramsgate, and Dover. This shot was taken along the beach at Ramsgate when the tide was starting to come in during the early afternoon. While there are some beautiful parts of town, several areas have fallen on hard times (I've been told it is undergoing a period of revival). I found this pipe buried under the fine sand, leading out into the water. I have no idea what it is used for, but that is where one's imagination can take over.

The Photo

Compared to other coastal shots I've captured, the set-up for this was pretty simple. An article that covers the different filters I've used can be found here: [link]

Because this was my first visit to the area I wasn't sure what to expect in terms of photo opportunities. I've grown accustomed to the relatively wild landscape of East Coast Canada, so using man made objects as a focal point has proven to be an awkward adjustment. The only planning done before boarding the train was checking the weather forecast and tide charts provided by BBC Weather Online. The forecast called for partially cloudy skies - conditions which are perfect for some long exposure photographs as you have an added sense of movement in the final piece. I was also scheduled to arrive 4 hours before high tide - plenty of time to scope the coastline and find objects of interest.

Most of the time I give myself an entire day while on location - a waterscape can change dramatically as the tides move in and out and the sun follows its daily path across the sky. The movement within a scene, the lighting, and the ambient colours are never in a static state - follow them and you'll be rewarded. A scene that lacks 'flare' in the morning could prove to be your favourite photo of the day if you come back to it later in the afternoon or in the early evening.

The following is a step-by-step process of how the photo was captured;

The first thing to do was find a suitable angle for the shot and prepare the camera. It doesn't hurt to take some test exposures to find the composition that feels right. Once you are there you can lock your tripod into place and prepare your filters.

The second thing to do was focusing. A key step is to find your focal point before you start to put filters on - it makes the process that much easier. For obvious reasons I chose to focus on the foreground detail, letting the detail fall away as the view moves towards the horizon. Once I had found the 'sweet-spot' I double checked to make sure the lens was switched to 'manual-focus.' It can be a pain to lose your focal point once you have your filters attached - an accidental push of a button can lose you several minutes - I'll return to this in a bit.

The third thing to do was attaching the polarizer (made by Tiffen), a filter used to cut reflective light on shiny surfaces and in the sky. In this case I wanted to cut the glare of the water so that I could lengthen the exposure a bit. Every so often the sun would break through the clouds and create strong highlights on the ocean - during a couple of my test shots earlier I had a few blown highlights on my camera's histogram. A great tutorial on histogram use can be found here: [link]

While I'm not concerned with creating the 'perfect histogram', I've found that it is a useful tool when I'm out in the field and can't see the finer detail on my LCD. It's nice to have information in the highlights and shadows when you bring a photo into an editing program - because it is a flexibe image you have more to work with and can 'push' or 'pull' a photograph more without losing detail at the extremes.

After the polarizer was mounted and I had found the desired setting I attached a Hoya ND400 filter on top. This filter works to cut all available light - reflective and non-reflective. It has the ability to cut light to 1/500th of it's original intensity (allowing for longer exposures than the ND8x I've been using previously). The nice thing about an ND filter is that it gives you more control over your aperature / depth of field. Before I was using ND filters I had to stop my lenses down to f22 or higher in order to reduce the amount of light. A major problem that I was running into was lens diffraction: my depth of field was increasing, but the sharpness of my photos was decreasing. Although each lens is different, most wide angle lenses perform the best (in regards to sharpness) between f5.6 and f8.

The third filter to be mounted on the lens was a Hoya ND8x - less powerful than the ND400, but it works in the same manner. When I combine the two filters the amount of light blocked at any given moment is greater then when a single ND filter is attached.

This is where I get back to the issue of switching a lens to manual focus. Once you have your ND filters attached you won't be able to see your image through the camera's viewfinder - they cut the light that much. That means your camera can't see the image either, and if it is in autofocus mode it will 'hunt' for a new focal point, ruining your previous set-up.

The final two filters that I attached to the camera were gradual NDs. As with the Hoya NDs, they cut the amount of available light, but unlike the Hoya NDs they offer the photographer more control over where the light will be controlled. A gradual ND filter is rectangular in shape and requires a special holder for the front of the lens (Cokin A, P, or X series holder depending on the size of your filters). The top of the filter is dark, while the bottom is clear - in the middle there is a gradual transition between the two areas. The first gradual ND was a Singh-Ray 2x Grad which was used to hold back the light in the sky. The second gradual ND was a Cokin 2x Grad that was used to slightly vignette the bottom of the frame.

The last step was to attach the TC-80N3 remote timer. I put the camera on full manual mode and set the aperature to f8. Earlier exposures indicated that a proper exposure time was 2 minutes and 45 seconds.

Photoshop Work

The levels in the final frame were a little flat for my liking. In Photoshop I had to adjust the brightness and contrast to add some depth. The second task was to use the healing brush to remove dust seen in the sky, followed by resizing and the use of the unsharp mask command to sharpen the detail of the downsized image.

Tools

Canon EOS 20D | Canon 10-22mm | ISO 100 | f8 | Shutter: 2 minutes, 45 seconds | Canon TC-80N3 Remote Timer | Tiffen Polarizer | Hoya ND400 Filter | Hoya ND8x Filter | Singh-Ray 2x Gradual ND | Cokin 2x Gradual ND | Manfrotto 190CL Tripod |