I am a meticulous keeper of tagged locations on Google Maps. Every time I see a nice photogenic spot in a book, magazine or social media post, I will log into Google Maps and save it as a point of interest. Over the years I have hundreds of potential spots tagged all around the world including many all throughout the UK.
One such spot, it Burnham On-Sea Lighthouse which sits on the North Somerset coastline. I cant remember where I first saw this spot, but its been on my hit list for a long time. Fortunately this year I had the opportunity to photograph this cute little Lighthouse as I was staying nearby in Somerset over the weekend.
Nikon D500, 5Sec, F9.0 Iso100
The lighthouse is very east to access as long you have a car. Burnham on Sea has plenty of parking opportunities and then the Lighthouse is only a short walk up a long flat beach. It sets on the sand and can be accessed at low tide, and this means there are plenty of opportunities to photograph from all different angles and its particularly photogenic at sunset when the sun goes down right behind the lighthouse.
The only challenge here is the tide. The beach which sits on the Bristol Channel is wide and flat meaning that the tide goes in and out very fast. Whilst I was standing near the waterline it almost required me to re-compose the shot in between each photograph as by the time I had taken the photo, the sea was already around my feet!
Nikon D500, 3Sec, F9.0 Iso100
Exposing the photo was also quite straightforward. Using a tripod I set my ISO to 100, selected an open aperture of 9 to make sure I had a wide depth of field and then focused in on the lighthouse to make sure it was sharp and in focus.
I used a mixture of ND Neutral Density filters and Circular Polarizing filters to allow me to take photos with a range of different shutter speeds, mostly resulting in various different "smoothness" look in the sea.
Nikon D500, 3Sec, F9.0 Iso100
The last part of my experimentation was to mess around with exaggerating the foreground. The beach here had beautiful sand waves which captured the sun and gave a textured look. You can see an example of this in the image above.
Nikon D500, 10Sec, F9.0 Iso100
If you are ever in the area and are looking for inspiration, Burnham on Sea is easy to access for any level of mobility, as its car-accessible and only a short stroll down the beach.
David
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