On day 2 of our Out of Acadia workshop we had a 5.00am excursion with Thomas Heaton to Little Hunter’s Beach for sunrise. We all met in the parking lot and set off together without any hitch. As you’d imagine we arrived in the dark. Our group (about 12) made their way down carefully, using our headlamps. Thomas Heaton is very much as you’d expect from what you see on his Vlog. Very nice, down to earth and he really tried to help the group in what he said were challenging conditions. He spent time with us giving us ideas on composition which was very difficult as it was a small, rocky beach with quite a large group on it, working in the dark with the tide coming in, the landscape and compositions changing by the minute. Also, the sky was clear so we didn’t have a dramatic sunrise but we worked with what we had and used the light and tide to our favor. Some of the group made their way up onto the cliff but I decided to do long exposure work on the beach using a variety of rocks for foreground making the lack of clouds less of an issue.
Timing waves and motion is one of my favorite things in photography and I often gauge the speeds of the water and try multiple exposure times until I find speeds to give me the effects I want. Here I wanted to get a feel of motion rather than misty water so I found that between 0.6-1.3 seconds was working well so I worked with those. I use Lee filters so I switched between grads and neutral density combinations as the light changed. I took a lot of shots on this morning and the one I liked the best is below. After I worked it up, I asked Thomas what he thought and said he really liked it but felt that I need to take some of the saturation out of the trees (which I have). This saturation happened as I selected Camera Landscape over Adobe Standard in Lightroom (yeah, blame the tools!) I have noticed this type of thing with orange tones before in LR where it is difficult to make it look natural (morning sun on certain rocks for example). I switched to camera faithful and it helped.
It was a difficult place to shoot in less than perfect conditions but we had a good group, Thomas was helpful and we had fun. Then off to breakfast before the sun had even come over the mountain.
I hope you like the shot!