Kimmeridge Bay is a small bay on the UK’s Dorset coast. This Google Maps link shows the location. Kim and I spent a few hours there on this New Year’s Eve afternoon. As you can see from my iPhone shot on arrival the weather wasn’t being particularly kind to us.
Arrival At Kimmeridge Bay
So as any keen photographers would do we headed back into Kimmeridge itself and had coffee and cakes! I can recommend the home made cakes at Clavell’s Café and Farm Shop. We then headed back down to the bay to see what we could make of the conditions. By the way, if you go to Kimmeridge during peak season you have to pay a toll to get to the beach car park. At the time of writing it’s £5 per car.
There were a few other people in the bay, but they were mostly fossil hunters (Kimmeridge Bay is on the Jurassic Coast), so we didn’t have any problems finding some quiet spots. The bay itself is also a popular photo destination with plenty of rocks and rocky platforms. It’s also infested with flies, so expect to be dive bombed by them as you walk along the beach! We setup on the western arc of the bay.
The first couple of locations I tried didn’t work for me, so no shots from them. But, I managed to fumble about at one location and drop my Lee hard grad in a rock pool, via a rock. Fortunately it only cracked one of the corners. If it’d been a glass filter (can you still get these?) I doubt I’d have been so fortunate.
The first image is a 480 second/f22 exposure at 24mm. A Lee Big Stopper and a Lee hard grad were also used. There were 3 kite surfers directly in the centre of this frame, but the long exposure hid them well.
Kimmeridge Location 1
The next image is 60 seconds/f8 at 24mm, but with a couple of degrees down sift applied to increase the depth of field. Focusing was done using Canon’s EOS Utility on a netbook that was tethered to my 5D Mk II. Again, a Lee Big Stopper and a Lee hard grad were also used. I’ve also changed the white balance slightly on this one to be a little more realistic.
Kimmeridge Location 2
The next image was taken with the Big Stopper swapped for a 3 stop filter. It’s 6 seconds at f22 on the 24mm to try and get more texture in the water.
Kimmeridge Location 3
The four and final image in this set is a composite of two photos. One was taken focused in the foreground and the other at the end of the rock ridge. They were then image stacked in Photoshop to increase the depth of field. Both images were captured at 180 seconds/f20.
Kimmeridge Location 4
