I set out for Staithes but realising that I had too little time before the light faded instead headed over to South Gare. South Gare is at the mouth of the River Tees near Redcar.
Having recently shot at the well-known parts of South Gare, Paddy’s Hole, I went looking for something different. I took a walk through the fisherman’s huts and out over the dunes hoping to catch the sunset with the steel plant in the background.
Seeing the setting sun and wind playing over the maram grass I setup my tripod. I selected an aperture of f/16 and using live view focused on the near foreground. The small aperture ensured that anything beyond the focal point would remain in focus.
I took a range of exposures to potentially process the shot as an HDR using Photomatix but in the end found that tonemapping the single exposure alone produced the desired results.
Before processing:
After tonemapping using Photomatix Pro:
The walk back to the car…
I watched the sun set and started the walk back to the car and decided to capture a few more shots during ‘blue hour’.
