P#27: A Spectacular Shot of a Beach in Maine

Making it Work

Brenda Tharp: This photograph of a beach in Maine was taken at another one of my favorite places to shoot. One morning I went down to the beach and there had been a pretty serious storm the week before. It had caused such powerful surges in the tide that it had come up over the burn on the beach and went behind it and created this really cool puddle. (click the image for a larger version)

The puddle had started to evaporate over time. What was left of it when I got there were these incredible mud waves -- a pattern that's created by the way the water moves back and forth with the winds or with the surge of the tide. Those mud ripples created such an interesting foreground. I used it to pull the viewer into the scene.

The really important thing that I wanted to talk about was the use of graduated neutral density filters in this photograph. It's hard when I'm answering the questions in the interview to really get that point across to someone, but if you look at this picture you can understand that the sky and the water would have potentially been brighter than the beach sand and even the puddle.

The reflection is typically darker than the reality of the scene anyway, but especially here because there's a lot of mud poking up through the puddle. I realized that I was not going to be able to make a picture that was going to capture the range of light in this scene so my graduated neutral density filter, a two-stop soft-set filter from Singh-Ray, was very effective.

I brought it down over the sky and the trees down to where the water in the background just meets the sand. That was going to make the landmass a little darker too, but I knew I could always lighten that up in the computer with a little dodging if I needed to.

The really critical thing for me for this shot of a beach in Maine was to be able to hold the light in the sky from overexposing so that I didn't clip my highlights digitally and so that I had color because that was the whole point of the picture -- that nice color of predawn light that was happening.

It was a very effective way to make this picture happen in the field. When I got it back in the computer, I only had to do a little work to lighten up that island and that point of trees and rocks, just to bring some detail out of that.

Audri Lanford: That's such a great example. I love the reflection of the sky and the clouds in the puddle. Again, you've got your lines of the mud that just take you right there. This photograph of a beach in Maine is just gorgeous.

Brenda Tharp: Thank you. It's so important that you have something in that foreground if you want your landscapes to work and to be more expressive. I think that's really the thing I want to point out between this picture and the previous one of Monument Valley. Both of them have very strong foregrounds, although very different ones at that. It's enough to take the viewer into the picture, which is what I wanted to do.

In Summary

This beautiful shot of the water didn't just happen. Brenda had to put neutral density filters to work and had to edit the image a bit on the computer. The resulting photo of this beautiful scene at a beach in Maine, however, was well worth the effort.