I have taken thousands of photos at the beach in Scotland. I never seemed to get tired of it.
I wasn’t too interested in composition when I took this photo. I had in mind from the very start that it would be a monochrome photo. So I was more interested in contrast and patterns than anything else.
As usual I put the horizon near a third line. I mist it lightly in this case as I didn’t check after i took the photo. The sun is on a cross of the thirds.
Also as usual, I tried to put strong foreground interest at the bottom of the image. So I put the small pool there that reflects the clouds. That’s your starting point.
My main interest was the rocks. They were granite and wet, so they were very dark. So I struggled a little bit to expose and balance the bright sun rise just over the horizon, and the black rocks in the foreground. In the end I used a 3 stops ND grad to try to somehow balance things.
The patterns in the rocks are somehow balanced by the (lighter) patterns in the clouds. Maybe I should have darkened the sky to try to make it more of an echo of the rocks, but I didn’t really edit this photo much.
Lastly, I tried to capture a bit of movement in the sea. I didn’t want to take a very long exposure that would leave the sea just white and milky. The framing wouldn’t have worked for that. So I waited for some waves to come in and used a slightly long exposure (1 second) to blur things and have some spray in the air.
Photography #PhotoExplained #Analysis