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Sandymouth Beach (Outdoor Photography June 2007)

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Sandymouth is a magical place with a fantastic mix of geological features and unspoilt sand at low ride. It captured my imagination when I first visited the area a few years ago and hasn’t let go since. I am lucky enough to have a regular base a few miles north in Devon and whenever I set off south with good intentions of exploring more of Cornwall I always drop by Sandymouth, ‘just for a quick look’. I invariably stay until it’s dark.

An hour after sunset I was rewarded with this image. The blue sky overhead reflected on the rocks, just as I had pre-visualised it. Nikon D2X with 17-55mm lens, ISO 100, 60 seconds at f/11. 1½ stop ND grad, mirror lock-up, cable release, tripod.

Sandymouth can get very busy during the summer, but I have found that June offers the best combination of low visitor numbers and good weather. This particular day dawned bright and cloudless, which can he quite demoralising for a landscape photographer wishing for interesting sky. I knew I should have been heading for some nearby tourist traps for some bread and butter travel and postcard-style shots, but I was again drawn to Sandymouth.

On arrival, I figured that the low setting sun would create some interest over the rocks and rippled sand left by the retreating tide although I wasn’t holding out much hope for an interesting sunset or dusk sky. With a few decent shots in the bag, once the sun finally disappeared from view I started to think about packing up and heading back to base. Having witnessed many photographers march off from a location immediately after sunset – only to miss the best light of the day - I hung around for a while to see what the light would do.

Colour started to form in the sky to the Northwest and, as I watched, the sky turned a deep blue with a lovely pink on the horizon. Hmm, how could make the best of this?

Fading light

I wanted to include the rock formations on the beach, yet show the blue sky overhead and the contrasting colours on the horizon. However, unless the rock was a major part of the composition, I knew I would end up with a colourful image with nothing of real interest in it. Where rock meets sand there is almost always standing water, and there was the solution to my dilemma. I saw the potential to include the colour of the sky as reflected light from the water and the wet rock. I had to use a certain amount of imagination to visualise what this might took like, because by now the rock just looked black to my eyes in the dim light, and there lay my next problem.

Using my spotmeter I determined that a 1½ stop ND grad filter would offer the right balance between rock and sky, but the image in my viewfinder was too dark to see properly. Composition was becoming difficult and focusing almost impossible. Even armed with a set of hyperfocal distance tables, the markings on modern SLR lenses can he as useful as chocolate teapots when it comes to manually focussing without the viewfinder.

My torch would have been ideal to illuminate the foreground enough for the depth-of-field preview to he useful, but carelessness on my part meant it was not in my bag today. Fortunately, the LCD can be a helpful tool in these situations, although I couldn’t afford to spend too much time making exposures then checking focus on the screen before the light ran out. I could have stopped down to f/16 or f/22 to make focusing less critical, but I’ve found stopping down below f/11 noticeably softens the image using the Nikon D2X, although with hindsight perhaps f/13 would have been a good compromise in the situation.

So, an hour after sunset I had a memorable image from a day where did exactly what I set out not to do. Still there was always tomorrow.
 

Conditions were on my side as the sun set. Although the sunset itself was rather plain, the warm sunlight on the rocks and contours of the sand more than made up for it. Nikon D2X with 17-55mm lens, ISO 100, 1/20 seconds at f/11, 1 stop ND grad, mirror lock-up, cable release, tripod.

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