The lighthouse at Portland Bill in Dorset looks great in afternoon sunlight, and it was certainly looking its best when I made a short visit to the island one afternoon in March to experiment with a new digital camera. One of the drawbacks of digital is the ferocity with which bright highlights can be clipped, and the clean white paint on the sunlit lighthouse was giving my CCD a hard time. I had to use a 2-stop neutral density graduated filter to enable me to capture detail in the whitewashed stonework- quite unusual for a daytime shot! One of the boulders lying around the quarry workings made a great foreground, and it is here that the new technology redeemed itself: the shadow detail captured in the shaded parts of the foreground far exceeds what I would expect to be captured by transparency film. To cap it all, I was rather pleased that the two little clouds decided to sit obligingly on either side of the lighthouse for me!
Nikon D200, 10-20mm lens, polariser, 0.6 ND grad filter.
© Copyright 2008 Ed Pavelin.
Ref: 131-001
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