Mid-Winter magic light

Winter on the West Coast of the South Island where I live, isn't as cold or extreme as it is in other parts of New Zealand. You have to travel about an hour to the east to see any snow, or about six hours south towards Wanaka, Queenstown and Otago (where it can get very extreme). At home we can get the occasional hoar frost in the coldest months (July/August), but that's about as rough as it gets. And I ain't complaining.

What we do often get on the coast in these winter months, is crisp, clear days and intensely colourful sunsets. There seems to be less cloud around at this time of the year (don't as me why), so the intense colours at sunset are unobstructed - seeming only to add to their intensity.

Rock glow. Olympus OM-D E-M1 with Zuiko 12-50mm EZ. f/8 @ 1/400th, ISO 200

I understand that photographing beautiful colours at sunset is not every photographers cup-of-tea. I get that... kind of. And then again, I kinda don't? Maybe it has something to do with not wanting to be too chocolate-boxey or obvious. Maybe they think that pointing your camera at a landscape lit by glorious colours is too easy? Or maybe they believe that if you've seen one sunset, you've seen them all?

I don't agree (obviously). I've never shied away from chocolate-box subject matter - although I'd like to think that I still bring my own unique 'eye' to the resulting photo? But even if I don't, what's wrong with a photographer wanting to capture jaw-droppingly beautiful light? Isn't that why we are encouraged to shoot during 'golden hour'? 

Rapahoe Rock. OM-D E-M1 with Lumix 45-150mm. f/5.6 @ 3.2secs, ISO 200. ND filter

The mid-winter light doesn't get much more golden than last evening (as I write this), at one of my favourite places to shoot - Rapahoe Beach. I had been to the beach with friends during the day a few weeks ago, testing out my newly acquired E-M10 (see the post here). We went to an area of the beach I hadn't really explored before, and so I made a mental note to come back during the evening, at low tide, with good light. I didn't have to wait long. A few weeks later and the conditions lined-up. I left work about half an hour early, and was out at the beach before sunset to see what I could capture.

Mid-winter sunset, Rapahoe. OM-D E-M1 with Zuiko 12-50mm EZ. f/9 @ 1/3rd sec, ISO 200

Sunset coincided almost perfectly with low tide, which was a blessing and a curse. It was a blessing because I wanted low-tide to expose the rocks that would otherwise be submerged, thereby creating some foreground interest to the composition. But it was a curse because at extreme low tide the shoreline recedes a great distance out from the beach, so most of the rocks I wanted to use were meters away from the water.

As you can see from the image above, I did manage to find one lone rock, that I could place in the foreground and play with some movement in the water. But I would have preferred to shoot higher up the beach where there were dozens more rocks. So as it turned out, the extreme low-tide wasn't really when I wanted to be there. I will need to go out again on the turning tide, maybe a couple of hours after high tide as it's moving into low tide? That way I should  be able to reach the rocks to photograph them, but there will still be enough water around to make for interesting compositions. That's the plan anyway...

Let there be light. OM-D E-M1 with Zuiko 12-50mm EZ. f/16 @ 1 sec, ISO 200

Having established that the conditions weren't exactly how I wanted them, and having taken a few images that I thought captured the feeling I was going for, my mind once again flipped into ICM (intentional camera movement) mode.

Light levels were dropping rapidly, so I was able to get exposure times upwards of 1 second with apertures of f16. With no clouds in the sky at all, and bands of colour stretching along the horizon, my immediate instinct was to pan quickly across the scene to accentuate them. This worked really well, with the resulting images still having a landscape/seacape feel while capturing that abstract ICM quality.

The Duplicity of Light. OM-D E-M1 with Zuiko 12-50mm EZ. f/8 @ 2.5secs, ISO 200

But the mere nature of experimentation with ICM photography is that you can create the unexpected. The above photo - The Duplicity of Light -  is my favourite shot from the evening. It looks almost like a double exposure, but it's not. At least not in the truest sense of the meaning. What do I mean by that?

Well because, by using the ICM technique, it is in some ways a double exposure image, as I intended it to be. It's just a double exposure taken with a single image! Let me explain....

The exposure time was 2.5 seconds, which is quite a long time when you're hand-holding the camera. I knew I wanted a close-up of the rock with the orange glow on the horizon, but I also wanted the waves on the beach to be included. I simply started the exposure on the rock for the first second, then wriggled the camera down so it was pointing more at the beach and waves for the last second. Even though it was taken in one frame, it was really conceived of as a double exposure. And this is the sort of fun imagery you can play around with and achieve through intentional camera movement.

Twinkle twinkle...  f5/6 @ 1/2sec, ISO 200

However it was achieved, I love it. And it's certainly the kind of photography that I'm getting excited about producing going forward. Yes I can, and will, continue to capture the more 'realistic' (call it chocolate box if you like) landscapes of my region, since they too inspire me to get out and take more photos. But it's the abstract ICM images that are really 'floating my boat' creatively at the moment.

Finally, just a word on the intensity of colours that all these images display. They are all true-to-life and exactly what I was seeing with the naked eye on the evening. Of course I've lightened and darkened (dodged and burned) some areas of some of the images for creative effect - but I haven't increased the saturation in any of them. In fact, with my favourite image, The Duplicity of Light, I actually decreased saturation by about 15% because I thought the original was just too much!

Yes, decreasing highlights and adding clarity and dehaze (all of which I have done) will tend to increase the saturation of colours in the image - but that's where I've left it. And it really was as colourful to my eyes as it appears in the photos. Just thought I'd mention it in case anyone was thinking I had cranked the saturation up to 80%! I haven't. Not that I'm not allowed to mind you. They're my images and I can do want I want with them in post-processing. But that's another blog post for another time...