I've been to Marloes Sands a couple of times before. The first time I was passing through while hiking the Pembrokeshire Coastal Path, I stayed long enough to cool my feet in the stream before heading on again. The second time I hadn't checked the tide tables and the tide was unfortunately in so I didn't spend much time.
This time was planned, the tide was still on it's way out and I had plenty of time before it was coming in again. When the tide is out, this beach is a huge wide expanse with two paths down from the cliffs. They are so many different things to catch the eye, long stretches of rock pools, large jagged boulders strutting out of the sand, amazing coloured formations in the cliffs.
For this entry though, I'm going to stick with just two rocks. These two rocks caught my eye while walking along the beach, they were in the back of another composition that didn't come out as I had envisioned it.
The only problem was that the tide was still covering the way I had to go to get to where I wanted to take the picture. So I had to clamber across rocks covered with different kinds of seaweed, some more slippy than others while trying to time it correctly so that the waves didn't go over the top of the wellies. I didn't always get the timing right!
From all the pictures that I took of these two stones, I chose these two for the blog. I took a lot of images because of the speed of the clouds and also, more importantly, the waves. The waves change with every shot.
The first image was taken to catch the movement of the waves at 1/3200 sec and with the second I wanted to smooth off the motion, so it was taken at 1.3 sec
Even though the day was grey, the light was very bright, so both pictures were taken with a filter, which is the reason for the violet tint to the colour. I adjusted the White Balance to remove the violet and bring it back to how it looked on the day.
I decided to go for black and white because I feel that it adds more effect to these pictures, in addition, it was a grey day, and the clouds were grey, the rocks were dark grey, nearly black and the sea was a grey shade of green.
So now I have two black and white images. I also made a few other changes to both of the images to add some definition in the waves and lightened up the rocks to bring in more detail.
I liked how both came out but I preferred the cloud formations in the first image, so I used Photoshop to combine the two pictures. This is the initial result, I may work on this a little more, but I decided that I prefer the dramatic feeling and the motion in the title image.