Sunrise at the beach

WHAT

Sunrise at the public swimming pool at King's Beach, Caloundra. Caloundra is a beautiful sea-side town situated on the Sunshine Coast, Queensland and is about 1 hour north of Brisbane.

WHY

King's Beach has been a favourite holiday destination of my family's for over 20 years. I love going up there at this time of the year (or any time of year for that matter) and was on a recent 'weekend getaway' with my husband. I realised that in all my trips to this beautiful location, I'd never once seen the sun rise there. Of course, I had to make ammends by capturing it with my camera!

Prior to the sun rising on this day, I'd been at the other end of King's Beach attempting to get a nice sea-scape shot of the water flowing over the rocks at low-tide. This proved fairly unsuccessful due to the large amount of cloud around at the time.

After the sun had risen, I wandered up the beach to the location seen in the image above and loved the way the umbrellas were silhouetted in the sunlight. I then spotted the boat on the horizon.

HOW

I positioned myself so that the shade structure on the left would block out the intense, glaring white ball that was the sun and then waited for the boat to sail along until it was between 2 of the umbrellas.

I think I used a tripod for this one as I had intended to make an HDR image using 3 different exposure values and therefore needed the 3 shots to be identical. However, I decided that the HDR version of this shot didn't look very good so I opted for this exposure (the '0' EV) instead.

I used the aperture priority setting, set to f/16 with a shutter speed of 1/160s.

POST PRODUCTION

I used photoshop to shift the tint of this shot slightly towards the purple end of the spectrum to give the sky a nice colour.

Shorncliffe kids

WHAT

Shorncliffe pier taken at approximately 3pm. Approximately 40 mins north of Brisbane City.

The wooden pylons at the upper right of the shot are the same as those in Shorncliffe sunrise.

WHY

I love the whole beachfront area at Shorncliffe, particularly around this pier which is popular with locals for fishing and sea-gazing. This shot was originally going to be of the pier only- the kids (not mine!) ran into the shot just as I was about to take it. I prefer the scene with them in it as it gives interest to what otherwise would be a large empty space on the right.

HOW

I used aperture priority mode and because it was very sunny on this day, the camera automatically used a fast shutter speed to prevent over-exposure. The high speed of the shutter can be seen by the mid-air suspension of the water being splashed by the children, as well as their 'unblurred' movement.

POST PRODUCTION

Contrast was increased using photoshop.