“Titans” | Sintra-Cascais Natural Park, Portugal
As the sun kissed one of the sons of Gaea, an image was kept to remember and celebrate that magical
moment.
José Ramos ©
This place is called Malhada do Ouriçal, which is one of the most difficult to reach places I’ve been
to. Even though some brave guys say it’s easy, I actually found the access to this area quite dangerous,
with extremely steep/vertical areas of rock, where you have to use ropes to avoid falling.
One of the few time when I went over f/14. Even though I knew diffraction would kick in at such a small
aperture, the only way to get that star shaped sun with the Sigma is by using f/22. The light was
extremely harsh on that day, as there were no clouds. I rarely post an image without clouds, but I think
the strong elements in the image compensate that. I also had to learn how to get rid of the strong haze
in the digital file, which is much easier that I thought, using Selective Colour in Photoshop.
Had to use a 4 stop soft ND grad filter to be able to control the extremely strong light, without
severely underexposing the rocks in the background. Not easy at all to control light capture in this
type of scenes, but I managed to do it with just one exposure.
Exposure: 30 seconds
Aperture: f/22
ISO: 200
Filters: 4 stop soft ND Grad (Hitech), 10 stop ProStop IRND (Hitech)
Tripod, remote shutter.