I was planning on going to Glencoe yesterday but the weather just wasn’t right so I decided to stay local and visit a couple of places in Fife.
My first port of call was the beautiful town of St Andrews, surprisingly enough, I have never shot any photos here as I am a keen golfer. I looked at different locations before deciding on the Swilcan bridge looking back at the club house. My aim was to capture the street lights shining on the course while lighting the buildings so I arrived in plenty of time (about 45 minutes before sunrise) It was still relatively dark at that time so I deliberated on what shutter speedand focal length to use to capture the image i wanted. There was so much cloud cover, it was pointless to try a long exposure as there wouldn't be any movement in the clouds. I decided to shootwide open at 16mm using my 16-35 lens and get close to the bridge making that my dominant foreground interest. As it was still quite dark, I had a shutter speed of 8 seconds at F11 to get everything in focus making it as sharp as possible.
From there, I travelled towards a very small village called Boarhills. I have shot this location before so I knew what to expect. I was shooting a gorgeous little church on the outskirts, about 5 miles from St Andrews.
Planning is everything so i left St Andrewsin plenty of time to capture the morning light. I chose a different position for shooting this time, (I like variety of photographs from alternative angles). I chose the path a leading line but wanted some interest from the sky. The wind was picking up and there was some clouds in the sky so went for the long exposure. I put on a polariser to get maximum colour, depth and saturation from sky and the Lee little stopper to give an exposure time of around 7 minutes.
I was going to head home after Boarhills as the best light had gone but went on to the coastal village of Elie. After much deliberation on whether to take a shot or not, I looked down at the sand and it had a lovely texture and line leading out towards the lighthouse so I decided to snap a couple of shots!.
The shot looks like I’m standing on the beach but i’m actually in the water with my wellies on. This effect comes when using a polarising filter taking most of the glare away from the water. I also have a ND graduated filter and the 6 stop ND filter shooting at an exposure time of around 13 seconds to see if i would get any movement in the clouds.
