We passed a few days in northern Germany at the coast between Bremerhaven and Emden. We had a great time, good weather, beautiful sunsets and I took a lot of photos. Well, too much. As so often, I was disappointed with my photos afterwards when looking at them on my computer at home. Anyway, I took some not really bad ones and a very few nice ones. I set up a little Gallery. Nevertheless I gained some experience while sorting so many of the photos out of my collection.

Wide angle distortions

Keep in mind that using a very wide angle focal length the horizontal lines above or below the middle of the photo will be distorted in a way that they look tilted. I am using this type of classic composition a lot: Using any object in the lower right third of the photo which leading lines to the center or to the left. As you can see, it looks quite odd. Use a longer focal length in this case. Or maybe you have wide angle lens which does not distort the lines so much.

The mist and wide angle captures

Misty weather with morning or evening sun often looks spectacular: The landscape disappearing in the distance and the reflecting light illumating the scene. Just beautiful. I really like photos with this ambience. Although I want to shoot wide angle in those cases, mostly it is not a great idea. The problem is that you will get about the half of the photo of space which won’t have almost no visible effect caused by the mist. Use longer focal lengths, this will avoid dead space and help you to layer the landscape in front of you with help of the mist.

The mist and the colors

Mist kills colors. Shoot RAW to be able to recover at least some of the colors. Try to “expose to the right”, this means that as much colors as possible should appear on the right side of your histogram (without clipping). You will recover most of the colors stretching the histogram this way and you won’t get noise.

The sea horizon is horizontal

This is obvious and actually not worth to mention, but I do it anyway. Sometimes it is not as easy as it seems to be. This is even more difficult if you shoot wide angle and you don’t put the horizon in the middle of the photo as the line will be distorted. So don’t compare the middle with one of the sides, compare the very left and the very right border to check if the camera is really even.

This is especially important if the sea, or, as in northern germany, the watt is completely flat.

Sea sunsets

Keep an eye on your histogram. Especially on the red channel. You will get easily very overblown red values because of the reflecting sun and it will be almost impossible to recover decent colors, even if you shoot RAW as you will get more noise. Adjust the exposure or, if you have one, use a color filter.

Blurriness

On sunny days, especially after noon when the sun has warmed up the earth, the air just above the sea will blurry your photos. You can observe this using binoculars. You’ll see the damp ascending. There is no workaround, you won’t be able to freeze the world for the time of your exposure. So just keep this in mind. This may not be an issue in very cold regions.

This photo is a 100% crop. The unsharpness is partly due to the bad quality of the cheap Sigma 70-300 lens I used and partly because of the moving humidity in the air as explained above.

Exposure time

Another issue not worth to mention. But again, yes, I do it. Keep an eye on your exposure time. Normally you will get along with 1/125 or 1/250, absolutely no problem. But birds can move very quickly, especially fighting pheasants. You’ll need a bit more to freeze them.

Calm

If you want to take photos which should give an impression of calmness, leave much more space for the sky and less for the ground. The more ground and less sky you include, the more compact and terse the photo will look. The more sky you include, the more space will be there for the phantasies of the contemplators.