Welcome to Sussex Vistas Landscape Photography

Welcome to Sussex Vistas, my online portfolio of spectacular landscape photographs from around Sussex (and occasionally beyond). We are spoilt with fantastic scenery in the Sussex county, from the South Downs and coastal stretches to idillic villages and forests set in heart of the Sussex countryside. Our professional photographs of Sussex landscapes are available for purchase in the form of either limited edition or open edition fine art prints.

Also available are striking canvas and acrylic products which form a ready to hang piece of modern artwork that will brighten any space. My work has been purchased internationally by private collectors as well as companies looking for some unique artwork to enhance their business premises. I will be continually updating this website as my collection of fine art Sussex photographs grows and remain available to discuss comissioned work and image licensing.

I hope you enjoy your visit to Sussex Vistas and if you have any comments or questions please use the contact form to get in touch.

 

Featured Photograph

Periodically I will update the featured photograph and give you the story behind the picture. I will discuss a little bit about the subject and detail the reasons behind the choices I made and settings I opted to use.

Eastbourne Pier at Sunrise

Taken in December this photograph is probably one of my favourites of 2008 and will soon be gracing my bathroom wall as an acrylic print. We wanted something to brighten up our newly decorated bathroom and the perfect choice was an acrylic print which will withstand the humidity of the room and will provide a bright modern finish. I will post some photographs once I have had it made and got it fixed to the wall.

During the end of November and December I made a number of early morning visits to the seafront at Eastbourne with the aim of capturing the pier during sunrise. I planned my visits to arrive at the seafront about one hour before the sun was due to rise as the best views often appear before the sun actually peaks over the horizon.

Sunrises are always a bit hit and miss and until that magical time you have to sit tight and hope that it will perform for you. On some visits there was little to see with no cloud to reflect the sunlight and this resulted in a rather unexciting set of photographs. At other times the effort of dragging yourself out of bed it rewarded with fantastic colours and patterns in the sky. At this time of year it’s not particularly pleasant in near zero degree temperatures and it’s a good idea to rap up in multiple thick layers. Fortunately I have a set of gear I use during winter rallies which provides reasonable warmth for this type of photography.

On this occasion I’d checked the local tide tables and had made my visit with the intension of using the damp sand at low tide to display some reflections of the sky. After spending some time working on this concept I made my way closer to the pier to get this angle with the groyne in the foreground.

I wanted to use the angles in the scene to pull the eye into the frame and opted for the wide end of my 17-40mm lens to get the composition I wanted. In this particular shot I was working at 20mm which equates to 26mm when taking into account the crop factor of my 1D MKIIN. A goal of mine was to see some of the sky below the pier through the supports and the low tide allowed me to get down the beach sufficiently to present this angle.

My other objective was capturing some movement in the water and to do so I needed as slow a shutter speed as possible. Since the sun had already risen at this point I used a combination of settings to achieve a suitable shutter speed.

Firstly I set my ISO to 50 which turns the sensor to its least sensitive setting. I nearly always work in aperture priority (Av) mode for landscape photography and chose an aperture of F/18 to allow only a small amount of light through the lens. This also helped to increase the depth of field for the shot.

The final tool in my arsenal was a Cokin ND filter which sits in front of the lens and blocks some of the light reaching the lens to again allow a longer shutter speed to be used. After all of this the camera was metering for a 2.5 second exposure which although not as long as I would have liked would at least allow me to capture some movement in the sea.

Working as always on my tripod I set up as close to the edge of the waves as possible since I didn’t want to include and sand in this shot. In fact when the waves came in they surrounded me and the tripod in an inch or two of water. I used mirror lockup and a shutter release cable to ensure the sharpest possible photograph and timed my shots to fire just as the stronger waves were nearing the shore. In this shot the timing was perfect and caught the movement of the wave as it withdraw from the shore.

This image did not require too much editing in post processing but I did end up combining three exposures in order to get a good balance of detail in both the shadows and highlights which matched the scene as it appeared at the time. After combining the exposures I worked on levels and saturation a little, again to reflect the scene as accurately as possible.

I’m really pleased with this photograph as it all came together as I had imagined and captures Eastbourne pier in a different light to a lot of other photographs I have seen.