Sunset at Back Beach

a couple walk silhouetted in the bottom right, an island above them in the distance , the sunset above them glowing.

Last night I went for a walk along Back Beach, which is below Paritutu Rock in New Plymouth, New Zealand.

I was armed with a Fujifilm X-H1 and XF50-140mm f2.8 – slightly overkill on the lens, but I don’t have anything smaller yet as a mostly photograph sports and just changed to this system. Working within limitations isn’t a bad thing anyway.
I ended up taking a portrait of the couple in front of the sunset later after I’d talked to them, also.

My goal was to make pleasing images within the camera, ideally setting the jpeg output so I could capture what I wanted with zero processing, and I think I got pretty close most of the time. I sometimes feel like RAWs have made me lazy so this was a good exercise in being purposeful.
I made 143 images while out for approximately an hour, and culled that down to 43 (including some preceding ones of the old power station chimney and a couple of ships at the nearby port).

For those concerned with settings, the were as follows: 1/250 f/6.4 ISO200 WB:Cloudy
Provia/Standard Shadow:-2 Highlight:-1 NR:-2

I wandered the beach for a while but inspiration didn’t really strike. This next image is of the stairs you walk down to get to the beach from the car park above. I saw the people walking up the stairs as I was walking towards it also, and knew I had to work fast; the joy of mirrorless, I can see how it will turn out in the EVF as I quickly dial it in. This was the first shot of a few before the people walked behind the trees as the path carries on higher, and I feel it is the best of this lot; the rest didn’t make the cull.
stairs leading on and angle from the bottom of the image, half way up a bush/tree covered steep hill, above the hill into a pinky sky juts a power pylon.
1/100 f/4 ISO2000

Once at the top myself, I noted it was actually quite dark and the colour in the light was fading, so I racked through the white-balance settings and chose one of the incandescent ones to pull some pink out of the sky, and pulled my ISO back to darken the exposure again for some silhouettes. A couple were sitting in the back of their SUV, tailgate down and legs hanging out – but I didn’t know this and snapped this shot as I continued up to the car park.
looking up a hill at a Toyota Surf silhouetted against a pink sky,

pink sunset past the front of a vehicle
1/50 f/2.8 ISO800

sunset silhouette, car on left with a person looking out to the distant ocean sunset on mid right.
1/50 f/2.8 ISO1600

A couple more shots and then I left the fading light and headed home. Not a bad evening. I didn’t expect to get any of these shots, when I drove up as the sunset was disappearing behind cloud, but definitely worth sticking around and seeing what you can make of it.

#photography #sunset #BackBeach #NewPlymouth #Taranaki #NZ


Post images and content © Nigel Swan unless stated otherwise
Where to find me and ways to subscribe