"How absurd to call this planet Earth when it is so clearly water"

Arthur C. Clark

Location

This is another of the series of shots I took last month during a visit to the South of Portugal to shoot sunrises. Taken on the same beach as [link] and [link] at the same hour, but on a different day.

This was my fourth (and final) vist to the beach for the sunrise, and again I was presented with a totally different sky and different conditions. There was a thick band of cloud on the horizon obscuring the sunrise. The light was very cool and blue, and as a result of the cloud, it was relatively directionless.

This makes it a little easier to shoot as there weren't the huge levels of difference between the brightness of the sky and the foreground. Also, the light was changing much more slowly than it normally does at this time of day, so I was able to play around with different compositions and shutter speeds, and try to do something different from the previous visits.

The sun actually broke above the cloud levels around 30 minutes after "sunrise" time, and then the light was too harsh to continue. The cloud was burnt away, and it turned into a hot, clear day.
Very few people would have guessed that the sunrise was so cold and forbidding, and I guess that's one of the gifts of rising so early to catch the first light.

Technique

There were plenty of rocks just off the shore to set my tripod up around, but getting the camera so close to the water was a little stressfull, and also means constantly cleaning drops and smears from the front of the filters.

I chose a spot behind a rock, where I could securely fix my tripod legs (if you put them in sand, the waves will move them as they ebb and flow up the beach) in around 20-30cm of water, and arranged the composition.
The clouds were forming into an interesting shape, and I wanted to try and reflect the same shape in the water. On previous days I'd done lots of long, and very long exposures, so on this day I decided to work more on faster exposures, and try to "freeze" the water.

I set the aperture at f8, and then measured exposure from the rocks in the foreground. As these are at the shadow end of the exposure range, I increased the shutter speed by 3 stops. The sky was around 7 stops brighter than my exposure setting, so I used a Lee 3 stop hard neutral graduated filter (with the graduation placed along the horizon) to bring it back to within 4 stops of my base exposure.

I couldn't get the speeds that I needed to capture the water in the way I wanted, so I increased the ISO setting to 200, which allowed me to increase shutter speed by an extra stop.

I then used a cable release, and set the shutter to continuous shooting. When a wave came towards the rock in the foreground, I simply held down the shutter release and fired off 3 quick exposures.

Post Processing

I worked hard on all the images I took that week to try and get as much right in camera as I could. When you spend a week away shooting, it's pretty depressing to have to go through hundreds and hundreds of shots, keeping and discarding, and then processing the ones you keep to get them acceptable. So I try to get as much done in camera with filters as I can.

The original colours of this were very blue, and I may submit a shot using the original colours in future. But I thought this would work as a duo-tone with a very subtle blue wash.
The original RAW file was converted to monochrome, and then I simply mixed in a dark blue from the colour palette.
I increased contrast slighty, then resized it. There was a little noise in the darker areas (from using a higher ISO) which I removed by very subtle application of Neat Image.
Finally I added the frame and title.

Metadata

Taken on Praia do Camila, Lagos, Algarve, Portugal
Nikon D80 | Sigma 10-20 | Nikon cable release
Lee 0.9 (3 stop) hard ND gratuated filter
Manfrotto 190XProB w/ 322RC2 ballhead
1/5 | f8 | ISO200 | 10mm | 5000k

RAW workflow (conversion, contrast and resizing) in Apple Aperture.
Noise reduction with Neat Image. Frame and title in PS

Prints

Please note me if you'd like a print of this shot. I haven't had time to produce a noise-free large file yet, so I can only offer it here in a small size.
I'll try and sort it out this week