An Evening in Hamworthy

This is another journal style post about an evening out a few weeks ago to take sunset landscape shots.  The original intention was to go to the beach somewhere between Sandbanks and Bournemouth as I wanted some sea, sand and beach hut shots, but a quick play with The Photographers Ephemeris (a brilliant and free tool: http://stephentrainor.com/tools) showed that the sun would be setting behind the cliffs and I think the beach would just be in the shadow long before sunset.  So when I went out with a friend on this evening, we headed towards Hamworthy to see what we could find.

Sundown at Hamworthy

We parked up near Rockley Park and wandered down to the beach.  It was a lovely evening, but unfortunately once we got to the beach I just wasn't inspired by what I saw.  The sun was low in the sky but still bright and not really in the right position, and as I only had a wide angle lens (17-40L) I needed to find fairly big areas which were interesting and uncluttered.  The tide was out, and the sand looked a bit muddy and dirty - probably just a play on the light from the low sun but it didn't look like it would make a shot I'd be happy with.

It was a nice walk though, and we headed a fairly long way back round to the car.  We then drove down to a pier, still in Hamworthy, and this looked much more promising.  I went for a bit of a wander around, taking some shots of the pier from beach level, but I got much happier when up on the pier itself.  The first shot on this page (at the top) was towards the sunset from about half way down the pier - the black bar across the top is one of the wooden railings which I deliberately left in the image.

Resting Boats at Hamworthy

A few technical details: all of these images were taken with my 5D mark 2, 17-40L with a Lee filter holder and ND grad filters (I think all of these shots were with a single 0.6ND grad), and my Manfrotto 055XProB tripod with ball head.  My standard focussing method is to pick an aperture that is wide enough but where diffraction doesn't start to affect the image too much (typically around f/14-f/16), then switch in to Manual Focus and use Live View to focus the image.  Starting with the hyperfocal technique, I'll zoom to 10x in LiveView around 1/3 of the way into the image and manually focus at this point.  I can then quickly verify by moving the viewpoint to the horizon and the close foreground, both while using the DoF preview button to check the focus.

Tranquility

All shots are taken with Mirror Lockup and with a remote release also.  I fairly quickly decided to go for a more interesting viewpoint and dropped the camera down low on the tripod.  The 055XProB has the capability to rotate the central column through 90 degrees, so with the legs splayed wide open you can have the camera a few inches above the ground (or even close if you don't mind the shot being taken upside down).

Boats

The light on this particular evening was wonderful - beautiful pastel colours in the sky, and the view was serene with the Purbecks in the background and resting boats in the middle ground.  As the light was starting to fade, the exposure time was going up, leading to the smoothing of the sea and the reflections of the shapes of the boats.

Hamworthy Pier Fisherman

I'm not particularly up with fishing, but it seems that people start coming out when it begins to get dark.  The man in this picture came along and set up on the end of one of the arms of the pier.  This exposure was a number of seconds, but he stayed still enough for there not to be any significant blurring.

It's all over!

This arm was on the end of the pier, and according to my friend Colin who I was out shooting with on this evening, it may well have been part of an old mechanism for rotating and lowering boats into the water.  I just think it looks like a noose - not a particularly cheerful thing, but an interesting focal point to the picture!

Moon over Hamworthy

After about an hour or so enjoying the setting sun on the pier, we headed back to the car.  The sun had disappeared over the hills, so I took this shot down towards the water - on the tripod, and this one was an exposure of about 30 seconds.

Sunset Daffodils

Finally, I noticed this bunch of daffodils.  I've taken a lot of daffodil shots, but never one where you needed a 30 second exposure to get enough light in!  This was the final shot of the evening before heading back home for a bit of processing and uploading.

All in all, a great evening.  Putting some effort into getting out on a summers evening to take photographs was rewarded with a peaceful evening enjoying the water lapping against the pier, the boats and canoes gently navigating around the water and the sun drifting down below the hills.  What more could you want? :)