
I’m sure I have been called a square in my time, but photographically it is always a format I have liked. I enjoyed and still continue to enjoy the square format in film, so when I came across this boulder at Brandy Cove and struggled to get a clear background to emphasise the boulder with my DSLR, I realised that cropping to a square would help the compositional balance as well as getting rid of the distracting background elements.
I tried to get my timing correct for making the image, as I didn’t want too much water flowing through the image, but needed some to fill in between the boulders. I’m not a great fan of really long exposureswith water as I like to have some detail in it, so it took a few goes to get the correct amount of water in the image. The shutter speed was dictated by the grey, overcast weather and was about 1 1/2 seconds @ F16 at ISO 200. This gave a sense of motion but retained the detail. If it had been any slower I would have increased the ISO to try and get the exposure around one second.
Brandy Cove has some great rock patterns and boulders, which compared to other Gower beaches, is quite different. Others have a mixture of sand and pebbles or just sand. One of my other reasons to visit was to test out my new Tascam DR-680 multi track audio recorder. This is allowing me to start 4 channel surround sound recording for some future projects. Unfortunately I can’t post the surround sound recording on the blog, but a stereo mix version is posted below.
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I tried a few more images of the boulder as the tide came in. The images have a different feel with the increased water levels, even though the exposure times had to be a bit longer as well. At the moment I prefer the first, but who knows over time the second image may grow on me.





































It pays to wait and see – Caswell Bay, Gower Peninsula
These are a couple of images I made last Sunday while wondering around Caswell Bay. I had been inside all day and needed some air and a change of scenery. I wasn’t planning to make any images, but always carry a camera anyway. None of these images are anything special, but they do show that patience often pays off. I have noticed while doing some of my courses, that as soon as the sun has passed below the horizon, the participants are busy packing away their cameras thinking that is it for the day. Some of my favourite photographs by me and other photographers were made after sunset. In the image above it doesn’t look too promising for any interesting light with the sun entering a band of cloud at the horizon. There is a hint in the sky that there maybe some colour worth photographing, but often this goes rapidly once the sun hits the cloud on the horizon.
After the sun set and entered the cloud, the intensity of the colours increased and produced the lovely saturated colours above. Quite often after a sunset the light levels seem to increase for a minute or two. This is not a perceived change, but is confirmed by the camera metering system. This is the best time to make your post sunset image.
The image below shows how the light looses its intensity and the saturation of the colours changes after a few minutes. It produces a different style of image and is not one to avoid. It just depends on what type of image you want. I often joke with course participants that we will stop making photographs when there isn’t enough light to focus by. What they don’t realise, depending on the time of year this may be 40 to 90 minutes after sunset. So when the sun goes down, don’t pack up straight away. Hang around for a bit and wait and see what happens.