Story of the Image - Pentire Sunset, Cornwall

With these blog posts my aim is to give you a little bit of an insight into what goes into making my images.

I often take trips down to Cornwall during the early summer months. I always try to go before any of the school holidays in order to avoid the crowds, and so it was with this image. It was a June trip and I was staying in Newquay. Fistral Bay is a favourite spot and it is enclosed by two natural headlands. One, on the northern end houses the famous Headland Hotel, where I was staying, and where scenes from the film adaptation of the Roald Dahl novel, The Witches was filmed. At the southern end is the headland known as the Pentire Headland. (not to be confused with Pentire Head, which is a little further up the coast close to Polzeath).
The Pentire Headland separates Fistral Bay with the Gannel Estuary and Crantock Beach and juts out into the Atlantic Ocean and it tipped by rocks.
To take this shot I headed over to the headland about an hour before the sun was due to come down and after a bit of a search for a composition I settled on this one, which required me to climb down onto the rocks and set my tripod up in a rather precarious position. I wouldn’t advise anyone to do this if they are on their own.

Once set up I experimented with a few different shutter speeds, and I have another similar image that I quite like where the water isn’t quite as smooth, but I decided for this one I wanted to slow the shutter right down to create that smooth effect. To do this I used my Lee Little Stopper filter to block out some of the light.

I took the shot, and then with the sun coming down and it getting dark, with my trusty head torch I climbed back up and headed back to the hotel and a restful nights sleep.
Once back in my office the file was loaded into Lightroom and a few small adjustments made. I don’t like over producing my images so adjustments consisted of just a few small tweaks to the highlights, shadows, contrast and clarity, and a slight adjustment to the colours to bring out the orange in the sky. A small crop to the letterbox format which I felt fitted the image better and I was done.
I hope you like the outcome.