A Quick Stop Sunset

A quick stop on the way home tonight, to catch the sunset.  I only just made it.

I liked the sky!

Pembrokeshire – 3

The third image in this Pembrokeshire series (also see here and here) is also in the Carew area.  This photo shows both the Castle and the Tidal Mill at Carew, but this time they are not really the subject of the image.  We had arrived at our  rental cottage about an hour and a half before sunset on a clear day, so as the forecast for the next few days was awful, we decided to have a quick local walk and finish by trying to capture a sunset over the estuary.  This was the best I could manage.

The weather didn’t cooperate.  The clouds rolled in from the west, obscuring the sunset.  Wait for the sun to light the overhead clouds is the usual rule for photographers.   We waited and waited, but this didn’t happen either as the clouds dispersed before they became high enough in the sky.  I haven’t cropped this to ‘letterbox’ as I usually tend to, because I quite liked the expanse of twilight blue.  If you look closely, it is possible to see a couple of wispy clouds in the top third of the frame, but they didn’t light up orange as I had hoped.  They were just too thin.

A Monochrome Sunset – Daft?

After having a fairly unsuccessful outing a few evenings ago, one photo from which I posted here, I wondered whether a sunset at Ham Hill might be worth a try.  The sun was at least shining, which has been a bit of a novelty this spring.  I was in a bit of a hurry, so didn’t use a tripod, a common mistake for me.  I had a go at a three exposure HDR image without a tripod anyway.  I wasn’t happy with any of the colour images in the end, and accidentally viewed a mono option from the Photomatix Pro presets.  As I thought it was better than any of the colour options that I could produce, I saved it anyway and here it is.

B&W Ham Hill Sunset
The setting sun in B&W at Ham Hill

I think the field in the centre is of blackcurrant bushes.  It was the definition of the rows of blackcurrant bushes in this field that I wanted to include in the image.

Am I daft to shoot a sunset as a monochrome image?  Probably!

Sea King Sunset

I was fiddling around last night, trying (not very effectively) to take portraits with flash lighting on Ham Hill, when I had a few seconds notice of this photo as I heard the helicopter.  I knew that I had to try to grab a shot as it crossed the sunset.  Sadly though, I had no time, or my brain didn’t work fast enough, to think about shutter speed for the shot, and being in portrait mode at the time, I had the aperture wide open.  All I managed was to expose for the sky to get the silhouette that I wanted.  The result is that the shutter speed was much too high, so there is no blurring of the rotors. normally essential for helicopter shots.  The shutter speed should have been 1/125 sec or less for a Sea King and in fact it was 1/4000 sec.

Because the Sea King is in the distance, I might just have got away with it.

Zambia – Zambezi Sunset Cruise

Whilst in Zambia, and included in our holiday, was a Sunset Cruise on the Zambezi river.  This took place at the end of our second day at the Victoria Falls.

At the appointed hour, we all trooped down to the landing stage to embark on our ‘cruise boat’.  With no idea of which way the boat would be pointing when the sun went down, we settled for trying to find some seats by a rail on the upper deck.  Then we sat back and enjoyed the included Gin and Tonics.

Thanks for the walkabout.

Thanks to the Camera Club walkabout for getting me up to Ham Hill last Monday.  Although I only live a few miles away, and have been in the area for 50 years, amazingly I’ve never actually been over to the War Memorial before.  There was a nice sky, so I took a few shots of the sunset.  I think that, thanks to HDR, it looks even better here than it did on the night.  I know that not everyone will agree though.

Memorial Sunset

I’m still not really happy with the ‘halo’ around the monument.  Perhaps I will try again.  If only I knew how to get the best out of HDR photography.  As with everything, more practice needed.