Up until ten minutes before I had been sitting on this rock with these guys watching and photographing the surfers. It is a favoured spot for photography and surf watching at Millook Haven at low to half tide (though it is a good boulder hop from the beach access point). They were a bit braver than me clearly as the rock was actually turning into an island at this point, and spray was beginning to come up and over the rock.
You can’t really see that as this shot is actually taken from about 150m away; the telephoto zoom massively foreshortens the scene. The foreground rocks are at about 80m, the guys at 150m and the surfer at around 220m.
Sometimes it can give a little more perspective to a scene to take a shot like this. Shortly after I took the shot they decided to beat a retreat too.
Millook Haven, Bude, Cornwall, UK
Camera: Olympus E-M1
Lens: Olympus M 75-300 mm f/4.8-6.7 II
Focal Length: 132mm
Aperture: ƒ/7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/320s
ISO: 200
Lack of detail in the sky combined with the high dynamic range in the sky made this quite a challenging shot to process with a lot of masking involved. Color Efex's Detail Extractor was used to extract detail from the breaking wave; the contrast was corrected with Pro Contrast; and a Graduated Neutral Density filter was used to bring down the sky as much as possible without causing posterization. A little LAB colour separation was used in the rocks. With enough colour and contrast in the scene the monochrome conversion in Silver Efex Pro was then possible.
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