Last rays on the sand beach

Péllegrin beach in La Londe les Maures - Provence

Same place, same day but i would say half an hour before the one in my previous post.

Just some blue

Mediterranean blue

I don't do very often this kind of minimal shot. I had spent the end of the day waiting for dusk on a sand beach in La Londe les Maures when i turned my lens to the horizon. The 120 seconds exposure is just due to the low late dusk light. If i remember well i had 2 Hitech GND filters mounted in front of my lens to avoid a too strong over exposure of the sky.

The typical dawn on the jetty and a few tech thoughts

Dawn on the Mediterranean sea - La Londe les Maures

Argentière beach at La Londe les Maures. Same day than this one but a few hours before.

While commenting on my previous post, Mark Alan Meader gave me the link to this dpreview article about dynamic range. It made me think to a few things :

• It reminds me this other dpreview post about the Ricoh CX1. During the past years, camera makers were mostly communicating about the high number of pixels they put in their cameras. For compact cameras i'm not sure that increasing the mega pixels was always a good thing. It seems that now they're looking at other aspects of image quality and i think that's nice.

• About the Iridix technologie :
  I don't use the D-Lighting option in any of my Nikon cameras but i'm pleased to know how it works. In fact that's very similar to what we do when we use masks to apply different curve settings to different parts of the image. I tend to prefer this manual craft work instead of an automatic one but that's certainly because i'm an old time photographer who prefers to decide himself instead of giving the decision to an electronic chip :)
  Of course in camera D-Lighting can be interesting on a consumer camera or when shooting jpeg.

  This kind of work about dynamic range certainly gives the best of what can be captured by the camera sensor but it's not HDR photography. When the contrast of the scene exceeds the sensor capabilities you can't catch it all in a single shot and no algorithm will reveal the uncaught details.

The soft light of a peaceful morning

Argentière beach - La Londe les Maures - Provence

We spent the saturday afternoon here with my wife, my daughter and some friends. I came back at dawn on sunday and did a few shots before the crowd. I love the light on this one.

A lonely day at the beach

Beach of Péllegrin at La Londe les Maures in Provence

Same beach than the one shown here, not the same day, not the same place and at dusk.
More than 2 minutes exposure.

Some like me will find it a bit too empty, some will just love the calm and peace :)

A famous beach under a dull light

The beach of Pellegrin - La Londe les Maures

So, after many days of rain it suddenly stopped last saturday and i spent most of the week end walking on the coast with my camera and tripod. That was fine but the light was always very dull. I mainly wanted to find some new places where i could return with better conditions.
On saturday i spent a little time on this place. During summer it's a very clean sand beach with thousands and thounsands of peoples. This day it looked a little more dirty and i think i saw less than 50 people walking. I could have stucked there during 2 or 3 hours expecting for a nice light around 5h30 pm with a low sky popping out of the clouds. But the main parking was behind me and it was quite sure that at this time all the walkers would came back and it would have been very difficult to catch just the right moment with the beautiful light and nobody on the beach. So i walked back to my car after a few snapshots and drove to some less civilized places ...