Behind The Photo – Portencross Pier

» Posted by Mark on Feb 29, 2012 in In The Field | 3 comments

I first stumbled upon this location a few years ago while photographing along the Firth of Clyde, Scotland, if I remember correctly it was a rather stormy rainy day and while I recall seeing this pier I don’t think I took any photos of it. Fortunately I was recently back in the West Kilbride area and decided with the weather looking promising I would go for another look, there is a little car park just before the village itself that has without a doubt an awe-inspiring view, right on the coast with a view across the shimmering water towards the mountainous Isle of Arran, however while tempting the pier was more tempting.

As I wandered through the village the pier came into sight and I started thinking about potential shots, my first thoughts were to take a photo stood on the pier itself using the man-made structure as a strong bold foreground however as the pier is T shaped (if viewed from above) I found the composition never really flowed, there was a mixture of hard lines and edges running both into and across the scene which just felt to distract the eye. After a little bit of thought I headed back off the pier and on to the rocks just above the lapping tide, from here the shot started coming together…

For me the shot is made up out of three main elements firstly the wonderful dark coloured rocks that add nice weight and balance to the foreground, secondly the hard straight lines of the pier and the way it links into the foreground and points into the distance and thirdly the distant profile of the Isle of Arran underneath the heavy sky. I experimented with the exact camera position of these elements in order to create a balanced almost symmetrical composition.

On to the technical side this photo was shot on a Canon 5D MkII with a 24-70mm f2.8 L lens at its widest 24mm focal length. On the filtration front I used a Lee Big Stopper, despite being rather cloudy it was still bright and even with the light entering the camera reduced by 10 stops the exposure was only 2 minutes at f16. However when viewing the results on the back of the camera this exposure was working well, the clouds were moving through the sky and a couple of minutes really helped to captured the motion, if I had used a longer shutter speed I may have got less texture and a flatter sky. In addition to the Lee Big Stopper and in order to balance the brighter sky to the dark foreground I used a Lee 0.6 ND hard graduated filter, I placed the transition right on the horizon which darkened the sky and distant mountains but left the water untouched.

As the afternoon went on the conditions started to change and I found myself up against the clock, the tide was going out which in the end meant that the little rocky island in the foreground was no longer isolated and just became part of the other foreground rocks. To make it even worse there was a big patch of empty blue sky moving in from the right which was starting to create some unbalanced skies which is something I always try and avoid. It was time to call it a day.