Once we arrived at Worth Matravers, I realised that the distance between the car park and the shooting location was about 1 mile and with 20 minutes remaining, that wasn’t going to happen with my camera gear and my belly… I was back in the car in a shot and looked for the next place along the coast, I couldn’t believe it… it was… Kimmeridge Bay…
With little time left I headed down to Kimmeridge and arrived just as the sun was cresting on the hills and still had to walk to the beach so I knew I’d missed the it, but I was there and decided to at least get the moments around sunset…
This was Claudia’s first trip to Kimmeridge and I was quite excited about heading down to the beach. We rounded the corner from the steps and I couldn’t stop laughing, there were 20 or so photographers all camped in my favourite spot. Because of my laughter they all stared and some joined in realising what I was laughing at.
I setup and started shooting in one of the quieter areas and got chatting to one of the photographers while Claudia sat down and started reading the book she’d brought to the beach. I explained the run around we’d had and he was chatting about the fact that they were on a photography workshop. He mentioned a piece of software that the workshop leader was using “The Photographers Ephemeris”, but we’ll get onto that later.
I rattled off about 20 shots ranging from 15 to 120 seconds and noticed he was using the big stopper, he’d just finished a 15 minute exposure. I have to say I was really impressed by the results of the big stopper. I’ve already added it to my must buy list, an ND30 filter will be pretty fun to play with, especially in full daylight.
A couple of samples as usual, but you can see the fullsize ones on the website.
We ended the shoot at around 9:00 and headed off to the hotel we’d booked in pool. As we approached, I realised that it was all a bit dark. Literally minutes before the hotel and the surrounding area of Sandbanks had a power outtage so we had to spend the first 40 minutes in darkness, but eventually the power came back and it was time to settle down in bed… TV on and mind off, it was all good… 🙂
Anyway moving on a little, I decided to search on my iphone for photographers ephemeris to see what would come up and low and behold, there was an iphone version. It was priced at £5.99 which is really at the top end of what I’ve paid for iphone apps in the past, but I figured it could be quite useful. I have to say that useful really doesn’t cover what the software is, it’s awesome! It’s the most useful and impressive software I’ve seen for me as a photographer using the iphone and has effectively made the iphone into the #1 tool for me. I had lots of other cool pieces of software on there for GPS logging etc, but Ephemeris makes the pre-planning of trips a breeze… when adding this to UK Tides 2010 you have all the information you need to know the optimal place to take coastal photo’s, the angle of sunrise, sunset in relation to the environment, the moons location and position in the sky. You can set the date and time to see the where the moon and sun will be when you are in a given location. It’s completely integrated with google maps, so you have that entire mapping engine as the core of the product… again, spot on Mr Stephen Trainor! 🙂
If you decide to use the PC based version of the product you’ll have to had Adobe Air installed and the cost if free of charge. You can still make donations for the software and I would heartily recommend doing so as the software is definitely worth it.
Check out the screenshot below to see what it looks like on the iphone, also, head on over to Stephen Trainors website: http://stephentrainor.com/tools
Take care all, blog soon…