Weybourne Beach at Sunset

Following on from my last post I decided to revisit Weybourne and attempt to capture the beach vista looking West along the coast with the tractor and boat as a focal point. To do this was going to be tricky as the last image I took was a close up of the machines shot at about 28 mm on a full frame DSLR. This is about as wide as I can shoot with the Nikkor 24-70mm F2.8 as it vignettes a bit at 24 mm with P series ND filters attached. I wanted to keep the machinery in the same position so the only option to me and one I had been thinking about since the last visit was a multi stitch panorama. I thought about the problems I might face on the day and set about preparing a shooting plan. The actual stitch in theory seemed easy but with the machinery and lobster pot only about six feet in front of the camera and the rest of the image disappearing off into the distance, I knew things wouldn't be quite that straight forward. I don't own a panoramic head which would have allowed me to shoot around the nodal point of the lens thus eliminating much of the distortion that I knew may creep into the final stitched image. All I could do was to keep the camera as level as possible and hope that the distortion wasn't too major. The other issue I faced was trying to hold back the brightness of the sky while exposing for the foreground. A three stop ND Grad was used to do this but it meant cutting through the boat and tractor on the right hand side of the image. I figured the best way round this problem was to shoot two images of the machinery, one with a filter, one without, and simply blend them together. This worked a treat. The stitch went well in Photoshop and I was able to use the vast majority of the finished photograph which was made up of three separate images. The real beauty of producing a panorama is that I now have a large file which I can print to a really impressive size if I so wish, something that couldn't quite be achieved using an ultra wide angle lens and the same composition.

Weybourne Beach at sunset