Landscape shots available here.

Last Sunday morning, I got out for my first landscape shoot in a while and I decided to keep it local by heading to White Rock at the north end of Killiney Beach in Co. Dublin. Although it’s only 5km from home, this was my first time doing a proper shoot at this popular landmark! And of course, a big advantage of landscape shoots on December mornings is that sunrise is not until about 8.30am :-)

Here’s the first shot as the red sky peaked about fifteen minutes before sunrise. It’s a 30 second exposure at ISO 100 and f11 using my Canon 10-22mm lens at 10mm. I used a Lee Little Stopper to get the exposure long enough to smooth the water, as well as 0.9ND hard graduated filter to balance the light in the sky sky with the land.

001-Whiterock-©-2016-John-Coveney

The next shot was 10 minutes later and you can see how the red has changed to orange as the sun rises. It’s a three element stitched panorama with the same settings as the previous shot, except the shutter speed was 20 seconds.

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Next, it was a quick change to the 100-400mm lens at 400mm to catch the sun bisecting the horizon – it's not often clear enough in Ireland to see this! (f5.6, ISO 100 & 1/1,250^th of a second)

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The action continued as this paddle boarder passed by (f5.6, ISO 800 & 1/4,000^th of a second, 100-400mm lens at 400mm)

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As I headed up from the beach, I stopped for a breather on the footbridge over the DART line and realized that the still golden light was illuminating Sorrento Terrace nicely. (f10, ISO 400 & 1/800^th of a second, on the 100-400mm lens at 100mm)

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It was such a fine day that I wasn’t the only shooter there that morning! (f7.1, ISO 400 & 1/640^th of a second, on the 100-400mm lens at 190mm).

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The DART footbridge gives a very different perspective of White Rock – and I used my filters again to get this shot – the exposure settings were 13 seconds at f16 and ISO 100 at 56mm on the 17-85mm lens. This time however, I pushed the 0.9HD down to cover the whole of the front of the lens to get a “9-stopper”, three stops  from the grad and six from the Little Stopper. Without using the hard grad in this way, I would only have had a 1.5 second exposure with the Little Stopper - not enough to smooth water properly in the bright conditions.

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Using the tripod on the footbridge didn't work well because it’s hard to get the camera out over the railing and because of the numbers of walkers passing – so I used my lightweight gorilla pod. This is only rated for lightweight cameras so it took time and care to get it steady and safe with my DSLR on it– don’t do this at home!!

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Once I got it all set up though, I was able another version of the Sorrento Terrace shot (16, ISO 100 & 13 seconds, on the 17-85mm lens at 20mm).

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As I shot, some of the passing walkers stopped to chat,  and I persuaded a few of them to pose on the rock when they got down.

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 It’s a good landscape shoot when I get a single keeper – so I was well pleased with getting several from this morning’s work.

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