Poolbeg JoggerI’m delighted to have had two of my favourite types of shots published in The Times (Ireland Edition) this month. The first was a weather shot - “Poolbeg Jogger”, that appears in today’s paper - 12 May 2018. The second was of the full Moon setting at the Ha’penny Bridge at about 6am on the 29th April last - that one appeared on 1 May. Check back next week for my blog post about my April moonshots.
Anyway, I headed for the Great South Wall in Poolbeg yesterday morning as a spell of wet weather with southeasterly winds arrived at high tide. As it was only a neap tide, I wasn’t expecting the pier to be overtopped by the waves like on a previous visit, but I still hoped there might be a nice long exposure shot to be had. When I arrived however, I could see a jogger heading out along the pier, so I rushed to get set up on my usual perch in the shelter of the blockhouse in the last car park - and I wasn’t disappointed as there was spray sheeting across the pier as he ran back. It wasn’t dangerous, but I was glad it was him out there and not me! The exposure was for 1/250th of a second at f/5.6, and ISO 400 at 220mm, using a Canon 7D Mark II and a Canon 100-400mm Mark I. Thanks to StenaLine for the loan of the ferry!
Once the jogger had gone, I settled down for the original target - some long exposure shots. After some playing around, I found that relatively short exposures of about 0.5 to 1 second worked best to show the spray well while retaining some movement in the waves – longer exposures smoothed things out too much. And of course, the relatively short exposure only slightly blurred the ship – thanks this time to P&O for their freight ferry! The exposure this time was for 0.6 seconds at f/9.0, ISO 200 at 190mm, with the camera mounted on a tripod and with a Lee Little Stopper (6 stop) Filter on the lens.
For the final shot, I wanted just a bit more context than I could get in a single frame, so I took three shots to make a stitched panorama in Lightroom – here’s an excellent tutorial on doing these from Photography Life. The exposure was for 1 second at f/13, ISO 200 at 320mm – again on the tripod and with the Little Stopper. All the edits were done Lightroom i.e. cropping, white balance, exposure, contrast, dodging & burning, and minor levelling adjustments. In particular. I used Lightroom’s graduated filters for dodging using both the exposure and dehaze sliders to emphasise the spray. I used the Radial filter to emphasize the jogger by darkening him.
These shots are available to purchase in my New Land and Seascapes gallery.
Keywords:
dublin,
dublin bay,
dublin port,
ferries,
gale,
ireland,
jogger,
john coveney photography,
lee filters,
lighthouse,
lightroom,
little stopper,
long exposure,
p&o ferries,
pier,
poolbeg,
red,
red lighthouse,
rocks,
running,
silhouette,
stena line,
storm,
waves
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