Bluffs
Location: Montaña de Oro State Park
Exif: f/8.0, 24mm, 105 sec, ISO 64
Shooting sunsets is usually a race against time, stick a 10 stop ND filter in front of your lens and you have even less room for error and time to execute. That perfect light lasted long enough to get 2, may be 2 shots. That’s it.
The making
We got to this spot in the morning and decided where we wanted to watch the sunset from. This made sure that we didn’t run around looking for a good spot when the sun was setting (been there, done that). I always thought location scouting was a serious affair and took the fun out of it, but boy I was I wrong. Picking a spot ahead of time made a huge difference.
The shot
I’m obsessed with getting that perfect creamy texture of water in my photographs. So, to make this shot, I had two options:
- Wait for the sun to set and hope that a larger f value and lower ISO will give me a long enough exposure, or
- Use a ND filter and get the water the way I want while the sun sets
Yes, the sky won’t be the same in both those shots, but I wasn’t worried so much about the sky, my focus was water. Get the water near perfect and live with whatever color the sky is at that time (hint: it’s always breathtaking).
I love shooting long exposures. Every long exposure photograph takes time, time that I can spend looking at the scene, without looking through the viewfinder. It makes me work hard to compose a frame and get all the technical bits right before I set off on a 2 or 5 min exposure.
