A Very Realistic Day of Landscape Photography!

Good morning and happy new year to you all. So we're here at this coastal location today to hopefully capture some landscape photos and that's going to be the main theme of the video today. So the wind and the rain was battering against my window all night. The forecast before I went to bed looked absolutely dreadful and I was kind of thinking to myself all night, no I'm just going to give it a miss but I managed to get myself out of bed, drag myself down here and I'm so glad I because it's a lot calmer this morning. That wind has receded, the rain has stopped, there's some patches of blue sky dotted around and I'm hopeful that we can capture some images today. Now I'm going to be here right through until dusk so I'm really going to try and make the best of it today, try to react to the conditions and just see what we come up with. I'm sure there'll be some takeaways along the way. So yeah I think it's time to get set up for my first shot because it's only about 15 minutes until the sunrise so let's get set up. So I'm set up here and I'm being very mindful because I've already got a wet leg from a wave that come crashing over these pebbles here in the foreground so I'm trying to position myself a little bit further back and I'm using the 16 to 55 zoom lens and I'm just zooming in on the landscape on the cliff faces there in the background. The image is very much right hand side heavy so what I'm trying to do is time it so we get a couple of lines of swell coming through on the left hand side which I think just helps to balance it a little bit and it helps to I guess make some patterns in the foreground as well so it's not an even spread of light. So yeah just maybe add a little bit of texture on that left hand side and I'm hoping then we can get some clouds in the upper left hand side as well to add some texture there as well so it's not just too much on the right hand side and we're pretty much bang on sunrise right now so we're definitely not getting any light coming through from the underside of the clouds because yeah there's a big bank of clouds sat to the east so we're definitely not getting any light there but what we are getting is that light coming through from the top as the sun is hitting that higher level cloud and that's giving us some detail through the clouds. Now this shot might work quite well as a black and white there's lots of textures and tones within the image and I think that's definitely what's in the forefront of my mind as I'm sitting here or standing here should I say taking this image so yeah I think it's probably going to be a black and white conversion unless the sky kicks off and we get some amazing colour which may or may not happen but anyway I'll take this image now put it up and then we'll see if we can make something else there's some nice rock formations down here on the left I think might work quite well. I don't think this is an amazing one to start the day off but it's something and that's the main thing. So I decided to stick with this composition I just thought that I hadn't got the most out of it and I just wanted to continue to shoot it over the next sort of 20 minutes or so. Now the sun is a bit higher up it's above that blanket of cloud that we had over to the east and we are now getting some light which is quite nice some rays of light coming down lighting up the sea here in the foreground I think which just adds a little bit more depth and dimension to the image I felt it just looked a little bit flat before we've definitely got a lot more contrast it's rapidly changing every 30 seconds the scene looks completely different so I think yeah I think it's the right call stick it out see what else we can get from this one shot and then we'll move down there. You know I'm just thinking back to that last shot I'm glad I stuck it out because initially it was not too good and then after about 45 minutes the light was absolutely spectacular so yeah I'm really really glad I stuck it out I actually stood there for about an hour and 20 minutes in the end just trying to make the best of it as opposed to running around trying to make lots of different shots you know just sticking with that one composition and I think I managed to get the best out of it I'm confident now that it's time to move on and there's some boulders or rocks that stick out the sea down here there's three of them in fact and the waves are crashing over the top of them I'm thinking that might make quite a nice intimate shot maybe black and white as the water's draining over the top of these rocks so I'm going to be using some filters for this I think set my tripod up down here we'll see if we can make something interesting work just this little area here just a bit of a vignette of the landscape or seascape should I say so I've got my six stop filter on now and that's given me about something like a half a second or a quarter of a second depending on the light and that's just showing that motion as the water splashes over the top of these rocks and comes crashing down onto the pebbles now I'm trying to make I guess quite a minimalist shot here I'm a little bit undecided whether it's actually working out or not but I'm giving it a go anyway I like the configuration of the three different rocks I think things work quite well in three so that's good I like how the waves come crashing over the pebbles in the foreground so there's a bit of texture in the foreground gives it a little bit more context to as to where it is so I think that works quite well conditions are quite overcast now so it suits this type of shot I think and I think it works well as a black and white shot these rocks here very very dark the textures in the water as well work well I think for black and white image so whenever I'm thinking about black and white I'm thinking about texture shape and form and I guess this really suits it quite well now I've got my camera set up in continuous low and that's taking three frames per second so when these waves come rushing through because I'm at a third of a second every second and we'll get three frames so that's quite handy and we'll see what it turns out like now I'm not 100% sure I like that last shot or not but I was experimenting and I think that's a great thing to do isn't it especially when the conditions come overcast like this and you're it's about experimenting trying different things and seeing what works and what doesn't work you could unlock something completely new so yeah it's always worth trying now over the last 20 minutes or so I've just been watching a pod of porpoise just offshore about 30 meters just feeding in this area absolutely fantastic to see I did manage to get a couple of video clips hopefully they come out okay I'll put those up now for you but yeah absolutely brilliant to see and I definitely wouldn't have seen them today had I stopped at home so I'm so glad I got out even if the photos today are all rubbish I don't care because seeing wonderful creatures like that in their natural habitat is just so inspiring and I absolutely love it anyway I'm going to see if I can make some more images down here now the tide's receding a little bit I can just start to see a little bit of the beach appearing down there so that means we're going to be able to move down the shoreline very very soon and see what else presents itself I've seen a couple of cormorant some oyster catchers as well this morning so maybe we can get a few shots of those perhaps if they stick around so yeah lots to lots to think about lots to shoot I'm sure can't wait to see what the next couple of hours brings so I spent the last hour or so trying to photograph some oyster catchers and they were sat up on the rock stair and it was very difficult to get separation it was all kind of messy and there wasn't a huge amount of light as well making it very very difficult so I decided to come away from them maybe we'll go back to them a little bit later when the tide recedes and they go down to the shoreline to feed so yeah that's the plan now what I'm thinking because the tide's receded quite a bit since we last took the photograph of these three rocks here we've now got some sand and the water is washing around these rocks so maybe I'm thinking wide-angle lens maybe a slowish shutter speed about a quarter of a second see if I can get down here quite close to the water shooting handheld so I could be reactive see if I can get a shot looking up the coastline there maybe using these rocks as my foreground interest so a little bit of a different take on what we took earlier the reason I'm not going to use a tripod is because the waves have been very very unpredictable this morning every now and again it's quite flat and then all of a sudden we get you know sort of six or seven waves come in that are sort of within the sort of shoulder height range so I want to be reactive I want to be able to get out of here if possible if I need to because you might be able to see there's a big cave behind me and I don't want to have to rush up into there trying to clamber over these rocks with my tripod so yeah that's the plan I'm going to shoot this I think from around about here so we've got these three rock formations and then looking back up towards the coast pretty much as soon as I got set up down there the tide receded over a sandbank and then I only got a short window of opportunity I really wanted the water swirling around those three rocks there I did manage to get a couple of shots but I really didn't have enough time and it's quite funny now there's quite a few dog walkers that have come through this section of beach now so yeah I think it's probably time to move on so I had to admit defeat there at the beach because there were so many dog walkers and the wildlife was just flying off so yeah I abandoned that idea and headed for the pasty shop Pembrokeshire pasties the best pasties in the county so I'm going to tuck into that and then we're going to head to a different location and I'm hoping this afternoon is going to be a little bit different we're forecasting heavy rain and misty foggy conditions so I'm going to head to the woodland to see if we can make a few images there before we lose the light but anyway more importantly let's get into this pasty and start 2025 as I mean to go on delicious so the rain clothes are on and I'm determined to make an image or two this afternoon now we've got about an hour and a half of light left and the visibility is meant to be dropping over the next hour or so so I'm hoping that we'll get that claggy misty conditions and at the minute you know it's just quite clear it's very damp very wet very atmospheric but it's quite clear and I need it to be a bit more of a dense fog to really make the location that I'm going to work so I'm going to keep my fingers crossed I'm going to walk down to the location see if I can make a composition and then hopefully that fog will come in as it says on the forecast but as you know forecasts can often be wrong can't they let me just give you a wipe there we go it's properly raining right now so I think I found a composition here looking through these spindly oak trees these oak trees are quite sure they get battered by the westerly winds coming off the sea here and they're all spindly and gnarly there's lots of vines and ivy hanging off them as well which is quite nice now the shot I've got in mind is peering through this one in the foreground and there's a nice arrangement a nice set of trees in the background so I'm using this natural frame in the foreground to to look through now ideally I would have liked a little bit more fog but you know you're working with the conditions you you're given aren't you and I'm going to try and make this work it's quite dark right now but I'm going to have to set the tripod up because I'm probably going to be working at around about a second in terms of exposure now there's not any movement in the leaves or anything like that so that's absolutely fine there's not a breath of wind now so I am hoping that the fog is going to roll in and it's just going to help soften the transition between the trees that we've got here and the rather bright sky so yeah let's get set up and see if we can make a shot here hopefully the conditions will improve as I get things set up so we've got the composition framed up I've gone for a vertical orientation I'm really using this tree in the foreground as that natural framing element now could this shot be better absolutely I think if we had more fog more diffusion it would really help that transition in the background there but we don't have that but we do have some quite atmospheric and wet damp conditions which is accentuating these mossy branches in the foreground and these vines are creeping up it so I do quite like that there's some nice leaf litter on the floor as well this may be one to revisit time will tell we'll see if we like it but anyway I'm going to go ahead take this shot now before I get completely soaked and we lose the light altogether what an amazing day I've really enjoyed myself now I think there's two takeaways from today's outing if you will I think the first being the past day obviously a great start to 2025 but also I think you know my mindset this morning was just stay in bed it's going to be useless and you know although we haven't got amazing conditions today I did think we got some nice light we saw porpoise oyster catchers lots going on down at the beach really enjoyed that probably found a composition here that I might want to revisit so so many takeaways and had I stayed in bed none of that would have happened so yeah just one thing you take away from this video it's just get out there and give it a go give it your best shot because you never know what is going to happen anyway I hope this serves as a little bit of inspiration to the start of the new year and I hope that helps your photography in some way or another anyway thank you so much for watching if you like this video please be sure to give it a like because that really does help me out and I really appreciate your time as always if you really enjoyed it there's another video up here that you might like as well anyway until next week take care and I'll see you all very soon