Hamelin Harmony

What a start in the new year! Oh, and happy new year to you all!! :)

Since we've been very(very!) busy in the last days of 2014 with planning, renovating and moving into our new place I haven't gotten the chance to take any pictures before the end of the year. So to turn things around a little bit, I headed down south to Hamelin Bay on the evening of Januray 1st to enjoy and photograph the first sunset of the year(I could have done the first sunrise but that normally involves getting up and unreasonable hours ;) )

My initial plan was to experiment with my new big stopper and the ruins of the jetty, but when I arrived in the bay I still had a few hours until sunset so I started walking up to the upper lookouts to see what I could find... Although I had already visited Hamelin Bay three or so times, I had never actually made the short trip to the top.  

As soon as I reached the lookout points on top of the hill I knew I had to explore "beyond the boundaries" to get some decent shots. So I jumped over the barrier, ignoring all the warning signs, and composed a few shots, like the 56-image HDR-Pano below.

View north onto Hamelin Bay 

With sunset approaching I realized I had little daylight left and thought about returning to the jetty below but decided to have a quick look further down the cliffs - and I'm so glad I did! You cannot comprehend what a stunning view I was greeted with... Washed out limestone cliffs, turquoise water, boulder over boulder sticking out of the water, Hamelin Island in the distance and a setting sun diving in and out behind the band of clouds on the horizon! Absolutely magic!

 The images really don't the real sunset any justice. In fact it was such a beautiful view that half the time I just stared at the horizon instead of taking photos - you gotta savor those moments every now and then :)

Another Pano - this one "only" done with 21 images (3x7-exposure HDR).

I was planning to go back down to the jetty to try and get at least one long exposure done but the results were pretty shitty... this is partly due to my mess-up: While looking for a nice composition on top of the cliffs, I remembered that I wanted to try the HDR function of my camera for more than 6 months and always forgot about it... So I changed my settings and tried a few shots but when I moved on I forgot to change all my settings back and thus ended up shooting 80% of that days session in jpeg rather than raw... duh!

Oh well, every day is a school day! I'll try to avoid silly mistakes like that next time :)