Long Exposure at Dunbar Castle

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A promise of a nice sunrise had me out of bed before dawn however the reality was a fleeting red sky followed by a very soft and flat light as the sun went behind the rain clouds that were coming in from the west.  I decided to head down to the rocks opposite Dunbar Castle and the harbour entrance.

 After a few shots at around 0.5 seconds I decided to try a long exposure shot to see what the effect would be on the fairly choppy sea and slow moving cloud layers.  Setting the camera to 'Bulb' and the aperture to f11 @ ISO200, the exposure with the Lee 'Big Stopper' fitted was 16 minutes.  I gave the exposure an extra minute and the result was an interesting, but fairly flat image.

 Using the NIK Analogue Efex 2 software I used one of my custom settings to improve the image, shifting the colour to a slightly warmer tone.  The effect of the conversion, coupled with the long exposure, has given the shot a 'dreamy' finish, bordering on 'bad dream' with the dark tones.  Given the bloody history of Dunbar Castle, this effect is in keeping.

 The image was shot on the Fujifilm X-T1 fitted with the Fujinon XF14mm f2.8R lens and using a Lee 10x ND 'Big Stopper' filter and a Lee 0.6 ND Soft Grad.  To keep everything steady the camera was fitted to the Manfrotto 190 tripod.  

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