Blog - Portreath Bay

Back to dramatic Sunsets with this image I took at the Portreath beach on our third day in Cornwall. As most of our holiday this was a very cloudy and rainy day with not much opportunity to take good photos. In the afternoon we went to the Golitha Falls since waterfall photography is one of the few things which benefit from an overcast sky and some rain. If you go to a wood with much moos and leave covered ground the colors will come out much better and a polarizer bumps it up even more. But we will look at some waterfall images in another post. Here I want to talk a little about the portreath sunset I photographed.

Portreath is located on the westcoast of Cornwall right north of Redruth. There are enough signs leading the way. When driving through Portreath you will reach the beach which is not so spectacular but has some nice rocks on it’s right and a pier. Mind those rocks which are very slippery but make a good vantage point for photography. When going a little farther out you will eventually find a nice pool hidden there, which makes for a nice main subject… but not so with this sky, at least I’m not happy yet with how that shot came out, maybe I will show it another time.

So here is a photo taken more near the beach where there’s much going on in the foreground. Mussels, sea turf and rocks make this an interesting area and for this clouded dark sky it feels as the better foreground for me. The narrow band at the horizon where the sun is painting the sky yellow and red was somehow typical for our week in Cornwall. Most of the days and evenings the clouds where just hanging over the land without much movement out or in. If you were looking out to the see you could see the end of that canopy but unfortunately it stayed much of the time and only seldom broke up 🙁 Well I tried to make the best of it.

If you read my other posts about Cornwall Sunsets you might guess how I photographed and processed this shot. It’s a focusstacked DRI image again – f/11 and Bracketing. Then I added some selective contrast and increased the saturation to get the final result. The other posts go into a bit more detail on the various techniques.

I hope to have a bit more time when writing the next post. I’ll try to provide a bit more technical details again. But for now that was the Portreath sunset 😉