Gwithian – Godrevy Lighthouse

Ok so it’s the Godrevy Lighthouse sunset today, or better it was 9 days ago and today I’m showing you the picture. As in the last picture from our first day a clear sky again. It was Tuesday May 11th when we made our way from Newquay through Redruth to Gwithian, which is located some miles east of Hayle. The Godrevy Lighthouse is located on the northern tip of a long stretch of coast which during low tide makes for some nice long walks at the beach. This is what we did after a first scouting of the cliffs facing the lighthouse. Later we came back just in time for the sunset.

Again there were some nice coastal flowers there and I got some shots when the sun was still a little higher in the sky, which I will show on another occasion. But this evening I wanted to focus more on the rocky coast below the cliffs. There’s a walk leading down there right at the parking place and since the tide was low there was no problem in getting to the front of the rocks. I figure that during rising tide this place must look even more spectacular and if it’s a bit stormy you can catch some nice wave movement there. But as it was with the receeding tide the scene was very calm which fit well with the weather.

One tip here. If you want to make sure you get at your shooting location on the coast at the right time you not only need to check the weather, you really should check the tides because they are one main element which decides what kind of photos you can take! Btw. it is good to know when the high tide arrives if you plan on hiking around some cliffs to get your shot 😉 So here’s a useful link where you can plot a 7 day prediction for quite a lot ports on the coast for free.

And before I forget, that’s the photo I’m talking about.

I tried to catch some of the warm light of the setting sun on the rocks in the front. To suppress lense flares I used the same technique as in the shot of Holywell Bay. I set up my tripod and composed the scene. I used 14mm here because the direct foreground felt a little like a barrier into the picture, so I left it out. Again I used f/13 but I could or should have used f/11 here which would have been sharper and easily sufficient to get the whole shown depth of field. As it is I still had f/13 set from the wider shot I tried before and since the sun was heading towards touchdown very fast I just forgot to check the apperture. Not to bad the shot is still quite sharp 😉

So as described in the last post I used my hand to shade out the upper third of the image just covering the sun and a bit of the scene below. Again I did bracketing to get more dynamic range. Then the same without my hand held in front which produced a nice little sunstar and the predicted lense flares in the bottom right of the frame.

Those 6 images went first through a DRI step which produced two shots I then used to blend the scene together. In the postprocessing I used gradients, selective color, selective saturation and some more selective adjustments of contrast and color to get the final image. Mostly I like to have some kind of color contrast in my images because it gives them more depth so I emphasised the light blue in the water a bit to serve as contrast to the warm tones in the sky and on the rocks.

So that’s it for today. I hope to present the next shot soon. Maybe I find some time during the weekend. Till then, cheers!