Montenegro seascape photography

 

Vacation for a photographer means everything but not just relaxing time, for me as a photographer, it is very important to make some unique photos and show world from some other perspective but that take lots of time, patience and luck, so let me tell you how did I spend more than 2 hours making just 3 photos.

Organization

The biggest mistake you can do is not to make your photography plan. Before your arriving, you should already know what kind of photos you want, otherwise, you will end up pretty messy with time and your photos.

before coming to Montenegro, I spent some time looking for perfect locations for making landscape photos and for that, Google Earth was my best friend. After i found this location, I imagined this photo in my head for witch i needed calm sea without any people or boats and definitely without harsh light. Sunset would be perfect but its still pretty busy there so I decided to make it at night.

Arriving and photography time

The day was so hot and we arrived at the hottest moment of the day, we got to our apartment and without wasting much time, we went straight to the beach!

The water was very nice and refreshing, finally felt much better after all those traveling and everything that came after. I will not go so much in details about that day because the most important part for this blog comes later.

That night was very nice and clear, weather forecast says that the night after will be stormy so I decided to go to my photography location immediately first night. I prepared my camera, wide angle lens and tripod for making long exposure photos.

What I didn't expect when I arrived is that stones were very sharp and slippery because of algae and waves that were constantly hitting stones, luckily, not very intense and it was completely dark so I realize that I was taking huge risk of hurting myself and breaking my gear, but that's the cost if you want to make nice photos, coming back with empty sd card would be so disappointing.

I finally found my photo composition, I was still on those stones so stabilizing my tripod was not easy job, I needed to be sure it would be very stable because water was constantly hitting it and if it made even a small movement during long exposure photography, my photo would be ruined.

I put my camera on the tripod and set it on manual mode, and next problem was finding perfect focus because everything was so dark.

To focus I used maximum iso, flash of my phone and maximum digital zoom so that i can be sure all details are sharp. Next step was to find perfect exposure, as it was so dark, and I wanted to leave my camera on minimum iso to avoid noise on my photo, I needed much longer exposure than 30 seconds, and light meter on my camera cannot help me in that case.

So what did I do? I set iso to 6400, F 2.8, and shutter speed on 4 seconds made perfect exposure but very noisy photo, but that's fine, that's just technique to find perfect shutter speed! 4 seconds with iso 6400 means the same as 4 minutes on iso 100 and so.

( Use this iso 6400 rule to find perfect exposure for very long exposure shots if you don't have better way ) I left my shutter speed on for 4 minutes, lower my iso to 100, F 2.8 and i got this photo:

4 minutes long exposure, made water so smooth and on the sky I got small star trails, those black spots in the water you can see are actually sea urchins, there was a lot of them and unfortunately, it was not possible to get better details of them. Also, nice idea could be to make the same photo with star trails all over the sky but i would need really a lot of time and that was not a plan.

Just 50 meters further I found another nice composition of the same rocks but on the other side, thankfully it was much easier to access. With a little bit longer shutter speed and the same Iso and aperture settings i got this photo:

Nicely exposed photo with again smooth water and star trails, i also liked how, refraction did it's job so that water looks so shallow and you can see all the rocks inside even though, water was deep little bit further. I was happy with what I got and then i just took some time to enjoy this beautiful scenery.

It was time to go and on my way back I found another interesting composition so I decided to give it a shot, it was easy to prepare my camera for that photo and the result was this photo:

Thanks to all of those city lights, it was much easier to focus and find perfect exposure.

Even though it was night, I set my aperture to 11 so that I could have sharp photos on foreground and background also but because of that I left my shutter speed open for 2 minutes to get perfect exposure.

I just like this photo because I have never seen this town from this angle before and it gives a very nice contrast and reflection in the water. I kept having rocks as a foreground instead of having no foreground which gives some depth to the picture.

With this photo, my photo session for that night was successfully done.

Overall, this was a very nice and challenging experience and my first time doing seascapes by night, I used some techniques I never did before and that made me see this kind of photography in a new way and also encouraged me to look forward for some new similar projects.