nomadlens
Images of the South West
Maelstrom, Hartland Point
Well, it kind of looks like a maelstrom anyway! I certainly wouldn’t fancy being in the water here.
This is the lighthouse at Hartland Point shot at the same time as my gallery of images of the Hercules Storm. Hartland Point is where the Atlantic meets the Bristol Channel. It is a wild spot even in the best of weather. Although the storm had not really arrived at this point I nevertheless practically had to crawl along one section of the path with a drop off the side.
If you do a Google image search for Hartland Point you will find many photos of the lighthouse from this exact point. Unfortunately, since Trinity closed the road down to it to pedestrians (health and safety strike again) there are very few places that you can get a clear shot of it. Given the somewhat extreme conditions I’m afraid that I was in no mood to be clambering down the side of a cliff to find a more unique perspective!
Many of exposures that I took here had just too much camera movement from the wind buffeting the tripod; indeed, the tripod and camera nearly went over the edge at one point. Whilst I did manage to successfully capture a few very long exposures where everything turned misty due to the high seas (I may post one in the future) this is a two second exposure which is just right for capturing the movement of the waves and conveying their power (and avoiding camera movement).
Location
Hartland Point, Hartland, Devon, UK
EXIF
Camera: Nikon D300
Lens: Nikkor 16-85 mm f/3.5-5.6
Focal Length: 38mm
Aperture: ƒ/9
Shutter Speed: 2s
ISO: 200
Image Details
The image had a bit of a contrast boost in Color Efex Pro and a graduated neutral density filter applied to bring the top down a bit. The monochrome conversion was done in Photolooks using a tweaked version of the Black and White Crunch preset that adds a lot of contrast to the scene (there was a pretty narrow histogram on the original as you might imagine, given the conditions).
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