Newquay, Cornwall, UK.
This image was just an intuition of a typical sunset in Cornwall when shot initially, one of those instances where the vision is not quite clear at the beginning, but it forms itself over time, in this case in the arc of a couple of years. The sunset was there, the beautiful setting on the coast of Cornwall, in England, was giving the subject, and the wide dynamic range of the sensor was used to capture as much information as possible by exposing to the right without clipping the highlights. The vision wasn’t quite there during the first editing though, but by looking repeatedly at the image for months, after more than a year, it started shaping itself: by giving more emphasis to the brooding stormy sky in post processing, and by underlining the wave coming into the opening in the rocks on the right, the image came to life. It now shows better what you might feel when witnessing the power of the Atlantic ocean.
The image was taken hand-held with the aperture set close enough to get good depth of field, but still being able to hold the camera still at around 1/25s: the steady-shot technology delivered a sharp image across the frame. The relatively slow shutter speed also gives a nice feeling of movement in the crashing waves. In post processing we increased contrast and saturation in the sky while reducing brightness to bring the dynamic range in check and enforce the stormy feeling that was so present in the original scene.
Sony A900, 24mm, f/7.1, 1/25s, +1EV
