Pre-dawn sea scape

P

paulca

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Name
Paul Campbell
Edit My Images
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Couldn't sleep. A 3am I was about to make an attempt when I caught the sky through the crack in the curtains. Decided I had energy to drive down to the coast and try and catch it. Unfortunately I didn't have the energy to wait for dawn, which was about 40 minutes later. It might not have been any good as it clouded in pretty rapidly after I left.

So... I'm a newbie. Learning a lot of things.

Ballyholme, Northern Ireland, 3:30am pre-dawn, cruise ship making Belfast for the morning.
Sony A6100, 55mm, f/4.5 3/5s ISO100


Lesson 1. When a YouTube tutorial tells you to switch off all the auto NR, take note, but don't actually do it, especially when your next two subjects are at night! Unless you are doing low ISO long exposure, you WILL get noise, yes you can remove it in post, but sometimes there is no other reason to edit the photo, so it just adds an extra step. Also, long exposure NR can only really be done in the camera while the shutter is open.

Lesson 2. When in Av priority mode, at night, your options are really to go with the smallest F stop and hope the AF works or accept long exposure or ISO noise. If you have ISO set to auto and you raise the F-stop the camera raises the ISO a lot to keep the shutter time sensible.

Lesson 3. Bring your reading glasses, that screen is tiny!

Lesson 4. Set your AF zoom level settings so you stand even a chance of telling it's in focus or not.

Lesson 5. Learn to set up the tripod better the first time. Getting it level will save having to mess with the ball head to level the camera every shot.

Lesson 6. Pay attention to what is not seen in the shot on the screen. I only seen the rocks in shot when I got back home, although they luckily work.

Lesson 7. Learn how to select the best AF mode for locking onto anything on the horizon. I was using "AUTO" mode, but having to try and hit the little ship with my finger at which point the AF switches to focus tracking, but pretty much fails completely a lot of the time, it's a big ask to focus on a few hundred pixels on a spot on the horizon. That said if I could actually get the focus box squarely on the moving ship it worked out okay.

Lesson 8. Spend more time looking around to catch incidentals, like gulls crossing the scene or silhouetted gulls sitting on rocks. Pretty sure I missed a bunch of nice shots. That said with such low light they probably would have been blurred anyway.

Can you add anymore lessons for me?
 
cardiff_gareth said:
I like it!

Personally, and not a dig at your image, but I think a 16:9 crop would work as this would kill the contrail in the sky and some of that black at the bottom.
Click to expand...

Absolutely. Good critique. Thanks.

I haven't edited any of the photos I've taken on the A6100 because the results are far beyond what I used to achieve before it... with post processing.

In the setting that it's the middle of the night, dark and dawn is approaching, but still dark enough to see the cruise ship lit up, works, but it does make a rather dark image. I wonder if lifting it would lose the "early morning" blue hour effect?
 
While I like the crop better, I'd have kept some more of the blue sky to offer more contrast.

If you shot in RAW you can push the files quite a lot and still keep your early morning "blue hour effect" as you call it :)

all in all nice photo and well done for going down at 3.30am. I certainly wouldn't have had the motivation ;)
 
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Very nice indeed Paul (a fellow country man too (y)) the third shot does it for me, I`m also a newbie from Belfast


Coho-Blue
 
Paul, the crops produce quite different images and well done for taking on board the suggestions and experimenting. Good work. It's the second one, the crop/auto-level, that I like best, and might potentially be of interest to the cruise company - no harm in asking! Don't offer it free, just ask if it's something they might be interested in; if they reply positively, you could always ask for payment in the form of a free cruise! But if you do sell it to them, get advice from others on here about the licence for use that you give them.
 
Another NI resident here. Well done for the early start Paul, it paid off. I like the tighter crop with the brighter exposure, it's a more pleasant image to look at and simplified.
 
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