One of my Bucket-list shots!

Hello and welcome back to my blog. I have a list of locations that I would like to visiting across UK and oversea but first of these is St Michael Mount, near Penzance, Cornwall. St Michael Mount is an iconic landmark in Cornwall and it was one of my ambitions to capture the sense of it in a photograph. I have visited it many times without success, sometimes I forgot my camera or the weather was ungreat for photography or it was busy at certain time of year eg: summer so I didn’t have an opportunity to capture the St Michael Mount without any distractions around it. 

An early attempt at capturing it in the evening made me think this was the best time for a great photograph. I decided to visit St Michael Mount in the evening, an hour before sunset so I would be able to get the fantastic effect of the golden hour in the sky.

I arrive the National Trust car park which is free if you are member of National trust. I explored around to find the composition as I wanted to photograph the causeway leading toward St Michael Mount but I found out it was high tide which meant the causeway was covered with the sea. It was a spur of the moment to visit St Michael Mount on a perfect clear, sunny day but I learnt that to get good photographs requires planning and research.

Without the causeway visible, I decided to look for a different composition to do a panoramic photograph which was my first attempt at a panoramic photograph but I had looked online for tips. I have found a composition which that work for panoramic photography of St Michael Mount and set up my tripod. I initially tried with my Nikon D7200 but this didn’t have live view so I used a Nikon D750 with a 24-120 lens. Using the histogram and live view I re-setting until it was uniform across the panorama then using the camera vertically mounted at around 85mm F4 this appeared to give the best view with no problems when it was imported to Lightroom. Having found the correct exposure and having a sharp image I then added a little stopper filter and a graduated filter over the sky to enhance the sky colour and to give a smooth effect on the water with a longer exposure.

I had to take a number of series as boats were moving across the scene and this would give rise to ghost images. I used a 6 shot vertical composition overlapping by 40% and then combined the images in Lightroom giving me a very large image size when put together.

Below is the final edited panoramic photograph of St Michael Mount. 

Camera Nikon D750 + 24-120mm F4, set at 85mm @2.5seconds, F11, ISO100. With Lee Little Stopper and Lee 0.3 Soft Graduated filter.

I hope you enjoy reading my blog and will see you again in my next blog post.

Till next time.