The Way to Heaven - Yehliou, Taiwan (Craig Ferguson)
Last weekend saw the annual Worldwide Photowalk take place globally. In the case of Taiwan though, it very nearly didn’t take place. This was my third year leading the walk and this year for a change, I decided to get out of the city and lead a walk on Taiwan’s north coast, specifically the Yehliou Geological Park. Fall in Taiwan usually brings the best weather of the year so I figured it was perfect for a trip to the coast. The weeks leading up to Photowalk had seen some beautiful weather here, with some of the best sunsets I’ve seen in a long while. Then, 2-3 days before the scheduled date, the rain started. And didn’t stop. As I write this now a couple of days after the photowalk, the rain still hasn’t stopped.
On Friday when it became evident that it was going to be a wet weekend, I sent a message out to my photowalk group mentioning this and also noting that the central weather bureau had issued an extreme heavy rain warning for northern Taiwan. As leader I still had the responsibility to head out to the site on Sunday and ended up being joined by 4 other photographers. I was actually surprised they came because there was torrential rain in the city. It wasn’t even possible to arrange a change of location because everywhere in Taiwan was wet. We got a bit lucky in that the rain actually held off for a couple of hours at the coast which meant we could at least head into the geological park and see if there were any shots to be had. Below you can see a shot I took with my phone showing the basic conditions.
The weather at Photowalk
As you can see, these were not exactly great conditions for coastal landscape photography. It was basically a flat gray everywhere – certainly not the most inspiring conditions for the average photographer. I elected to shoot long exposures and took a 10 stop neutral density filter with me. It at least allowed me to get a couple of photographs that I was happy with. The image at the top of this post used a 30 second exposure at f6.3 ISO100, and the one below was 60 seconds, f11 ISO100. Both were processed in Nik Silver Efex Pro 2.
All in all, I’m pretty happy with these 2 photos. I only made 34 frames all day which was sufficient for these and perhaps 1 other that I’m still deciding about. I don’t think anyone stayed out shooting longer than an hour. I’m quite eager to see what the other guys got when they upload their choices to the photowalk site.
Rocky Bay, Taiwan (Craig Ferguson)
