Long Exposure in New Brighton

I finally got around to a little photo expedition that I have been planning for some time. I had seen online some interesting photographs of the lighthouse at New Brighton on the Wirral and thought that I would like to give it a go with my ND filters and resultant long exposures.

I had to wait a while for some half decent weather and for the tide to be high at a sensible time, this week those two factors finally conspired to come together so I headed off Wirral bound.

Now I had hoped for some interesting cloud in the sky and that is indeed what the forecast promised but in truth when I arrived it was just a little hazy and somewhat flat grey, although it did brighten up later in the day.

One problem that I had not banked on was the sheer number of boats/ships that use the Mersey (obvious really) and these can rather annoyingly spoil long exposures, particularly if they just suddenly appear in the last few seconds of a two minute exposure.

The light was bright so all images were captured with a 15 stop ND filter, in my case from NISI, and given the bright sky I used either a 3 stop hard or medium grad filter – in some images I didn’t get the hard grad well placed so a lesson learnt there.

All images were captured with my Olympus OMD1 mkII utilising the Live Time function that enables you to watch the image build during the exposure and thus making the calculation of exposure time much simpler than without this unique Olympus feature.