It's been a while since I've had a chance to get out and take photos, so I've been left scouring my hard drive looking for shots that I passed over. This image was take last June at the gannet colony at Muriwai, Auckland.
This is what the gannet colony looks like when the all the gannets have gone where ever they go during the winter.
It was a rather windy and rough day and I wanted to try and emphasise that, as well as the feeling of isolation this location has when there are no birds or tourists about.
I had to wait for the right moment when the sun peaked through the clouds and lit the rock in the foreground. A 3 stop ND filter stacked with a polariser combined with an f stop of f22 gave me a shutter speed of 5 seconds which allowed me to get a bit of motion in the rough sea. Not so much that the sea became like a smooth fluffy cloud, but enough to convey something of the wildness of the water at the time. The fact that the tide was just at the right level so that the odd wave washed over the lower rocks didn't hurt either.