Explained: Harwood Bridge Sunrise
I have had a few people ask me about how I made this shot of the Harwood Bridge, and decided I would share the steps I take for a variety of my photos on my blog.
Equipment
Pentax Kx, 18-55mm kit lens, ND1000 filter, 0.6 ND gradual filter, tripod, Adobe Photoshop
Method
This is one of the first shots I took with my new 10 stop Neutral Density filter (ND1000). It is not usual for me to scout an area before taking photos, but I live around the corner from the bridge and new exactly what I wanted and where to go. I set up my tripod and camera on the north bank on a little jetty, and faced east at about 5:00am, and waited for the sun to rise.
I usually try and take my water shots at the longest possible exposure, so I had my camera set up for a 30 second shot at F22. The weather for this kind of photo where you have an interesting sky is best when it is cloudy and windy, which is exactly how that morning was. Even at 30 seconds, you can still see the wind on the water. I took quite a few shots from various angles as the sun rose and used my ND gradual filter to reduce the light on the left side of the image where the sun was brightest.
Post Processing
I usually process most of my photos in order to get an image that looks as much as possible like the scene I see when I take the shot, and I do so in Adobe Photoshop. For this particular image I had to remove quite a few dirty spots (from water spray, remember it was windy) and I also did a slight Brightness/Contrast adjustment. Finally I cropped the image and I was all done.
