9
Lighthouses If you’re a coastal photographer and see a
sea stack you’ll instinctively head to it, and the same can
be said for lighthouses. There are a few lighthouses in the
UK I’m partial to, such as Start Point Lighthouse in Devon and
Godrevy Lighthouse in St Ives, Cornwall, but it’s this Neist Point
Lighthouse on the Isle of Skye in Scotland that’s my favourite.
It’s imposing and as you can get close to it, you can use it big in
the frame for dramatic landscapes.
Even though a lighthouse usually intercepts the horizon,
I almost always use Neutral Density grads rather than to blend
two exposures. Conventionally, to avoid affecting overlapping
subjects – especially if it’s white like a lighthouse –
photographers use a soft-edged grad for a heavily feathered
transition, but I find soft grads aren’t strong enough; I use
hard-edged or medium-edged grads. If the sun is setting
behind the lighthouse, which is when I need a strong filter to
control the light, I’ll then consider blending two exposures in
processing, but otherwise I’ll capture the scene in-camera and
correct the lighthouse a little using digital grads in Lightroom.Ma y 2019 Digital SLR Photography 81
8
Reflections The reason water works so well in a photograph is that it
balances with the sky. An image’s composition is also strengthened
when there are layers, which is why reflections work so well too as they
add another layer to the scene. To include the best of a reflection, you need
to get low to the ground with a wide-angle lens – it's a technique that's
difficulty is often underestimated. When filling the frame with a reflection,
it's tempting to move back to get a better reflection but then the pool of
water can become less and less impressive. It’s a fine balance that often
calls for switching to a longer lens so that you can keep the distance and
perspective for a strong reflection, yet still allow the pool a larger presence
in the frame. A polarising filter can also help strengthen reflections,
depending on how you rotate it, but pay attention to how it affects the
colours in your sky at sunset or sunrise, too.