Cot Valley Sunset

It had been a beautiful day and my friend Dylan rang me up and asked if I wanted to go shoot the sunset at Cot Valley, I wasn't going to miss out on this one.... When we arrived at Cot it was awesome, we were the first of the photographers to arrive and the clouds looked perfect for a great sunset! I spent a while trying to capture the waves splashing onto rock with the sunset colors in the background. I moved up the stones to see how Dylan was doing and only at then did I realise the sun was about 30 seconds away from setting!

I grabbed my ND filter and tripod and started looking for an angle. Cot Valley has some really amazing rocks that have been rounded over hundreds of years and have a special look to them and I really wanted to capture so found my angle with that in mind.

I started taking some test shots and quickly realised the difference in brightness between the land and the sky was too much and that I would have to take two separate shots and blend them in Photoshop later.

This is fine but the difficulty is the two shots have to be lined up exactly the same or it is ruined so the tripod can't move a millimeter during the two pictures. Remember with the ND filter I am taking 1 minute + exposures to get the blurred water effect and suddenly that isn't quite so easy!

I took the shots I was happy with and then went back Dylan's for a bit before venturing out for some time photography...

We headed to the top of Carn Gloose at about 10pm with the hope of getting some good night time photos.

I started trying to take pictures of the milky way above Cape Cornwall but there was too much light pollution from Pendeen. I looked around with my torch and found a interesting rock outcrop pointing directly at to sea. This was an okay place for pictures but wasn't quite what I was looking for so tried a few other locations. I remembered the mine chimney we passed on the way down and headed off to find it and see what it was like. I used my bike light to shine over the foreground during the 30 second exposure so that you could see extra detail in them and it worked perfectly. I was amazed that there was barley any light pollution in the image because I was shooting directly towards St.Just. I was really happy with the image and definitely want to go and explore some more of the engine houses around Pendeen at night and take my camera with me because they have some great photography potential!!