Seascape in sunset

 Have you ever wonder how to take pictures like this? What are the techniques, settings and equipments? Actually it is not that hard. You must first study the weather and the sky for  the shooting day. Hazy and heavily clouded sky will not make the picture looks good. Some cloud is good to block out the harsh sun ray if you are shooting towards it which is what we wanted to do anyway. When you reach your destination, scout around the place for some interesting objects for your composition. The objects could be on the sandy beach or in the water as long as it could be included in the picture to make your composition more dramatic. It is not advisable to compose your picture with the object in the dead centre of the frame. It will not look nice. Bring it a little bit to the off centre to leave some open space for inclusion of extra things like the pillars you see in this picture.
For most shots, I do not like to place the sun in the center. I would prefer to place it either to the left or to the right side of the frame. The reason? Well, take a look at this picture. you will see two main colour to the sky. On the left it is blue which is not effected by the sun and on the right it is orange. It also gets reflected to the water so there is more colour to this composition. If you framed the sun in the centre, all you will get is one bright orange colour to the whole picture. How much of the beach to be included in the picture depends on your taste and the kind of compositions you have in mind.
Equipments? A tripod is a must have item. The sun is low, the amount of light is not enough to allow you to handheld the camera at slow shutter speed in order to produce correct exposures. In order to highlights the tree trunks and the pillars, HDR techniques are going to be needed here. In a normal single shot picture of this kind, you are most likely to produce a silhoutte photo. Most of your objects in the picture will becomes black in colour. In using HDR techniques, you can produce pictures like this as seen with your eyes there and then. You can feel like you are in this picture! This is the kind of pictures I like to take and I will share it with you. HDR may not need to look "painterly", you can edit to your liking, for me that would be as natural as possible.
When everything is set up and ready, take three to five shots of the same scene with different exposures of -5,-2,0, +2,+5. Make sure you don't move the camera. If your camera has the auto exposure bracketing function,  set it and let the camera do the work for you. As for me, my camera Nikon d3200 does not come with this function so will have to do it manually. Here is how I do it:
a) set the camera to manually mode. If your camera comes with auto ISO, turn it off and set the ISO to 100 for minimal noise reproduction.
b) set the Aperture to f8 or f11 if you have a mild ND filter which will help in producing misty water effects or set to f16 or f22  if no filters used. Also put on the polarising filter for better contrast to the sky and the water.
c) shoot in RAW if you can but jpeg will also get you the result don't worry.
d) now look into the view finder or live view if you like to compose using the LCD screen and the exposure
 metre will show its current exposure. Dial your shutter speed dial to underexposure to -2 or -5 depending on how many exposures you are going to take. Take care not to move the camera while doing this. Take the shot via cable or self timer because you don't want to move the camera. Then dial the shutter speed until the exposure metre indicates normal exposure(middle) if you intend to take three exposures and take the picture. Dial again for the next shot to +2 or +5 for overexposure and take the shot. I prefer doing it this way because it is easier then changing exposures compensation in the camera as it is more of a hassle and also when you load up your pictures in the computer it won't be able to detect the exposure values.
e) process your images with any photo softwares that can merge these photos for example easyHDR, Fusion HDR or the one I am using the Photomatrix Pro.
f) after merging the photos, edit as you like. You can edit in as many programmes as you like for the effects you are after.
Hope this will help in your future shots of these nature. If you like to know more in depth, please feel free to write to me. Happy Shooting!