seascape photography tips: How to use your i-phone to create emotive seascape photographs

Three seascape photography tips on photographing the sea and the coast Camera and Phone Camera

• Experiment with your lens, wide angle and super-wide are popular choices

• If the light is amazing, don't hesitate - you can take another if it get's even better

• The angle you hold the camera at, makes a huge difference.

  
  

The heat of summer, and lack of rain, seems, at first glance, to be gone.

Certainly, in the west country of the UK, many of the country roads have a top-coat of mud and stones, replaing the dust and grit of the last few weeks.

We were staying with friends in Newton Ferrers, that once beautiful village that nestles opposite that once beautiful Nos Mayo.

Both of these places with housing, increasingly vandalized by a certain community, whose 'sense of design' leads them to employ architects who may indeed be prizewinning, but I'm not sure who the judges were.

To return from my diatribe, based upon nearly forty years of experience of the creek and all that goes with it; we revisited the coastal walk from the Warren National Trust Car park.

The walk here forms part of the South West Coast Path, if you're interested it's stage 32 in the Cicerone Guide.

The weather was sunshine and squalls, 'precipitation in sight' is the shipping forcast description, as one of the squalls passed across that wonderful space where sunshine and water meet in that amazing blaze of brightness.

TBH seascape shots can be pretty boring, and I'm about to write about how to avoid boring photography with some seascape photography tips - by getting cloud and rain, and waves, and sunlight involved.

Image One - south west coast path Blackstone Point 24mm lens

Now, as with many of the images I use for these articles, they are ones I took by way of illustration , and are not the result of patient hours of waiting.

I could see that the weather was clearing from the west - the prevailing direction from which 'weather' comes, here in the UK, so opportunities for 'character' images were going to be limited.

Yes, sometimes my mantra of 'look until you see' is necessarily tempered by the desirability of not missing the moment - and experience with reading the signs helps. Grab the moment, and re-shoot if it gets better.

So two things I want to chat about, the first is the one addressed already, the need for character to produce emotive coastal images. The other is what lens to use with your iphone, other phone camera, or camera.

Let's look at the images

Image One, taken using the 24 mm setting on my Iphone 14 Pro, really focuses on the seascape, with just a hint of 'sea meets land'. It catches the cloudscape and the squall.

The composition, without the land, places the squall and the sunlight on the water, on one of the horizontal thirds, with the dark grey cloud sitting in the middle of the image.

Image Two - south west coast path Blackstone Point 24mm lens

Image Two, the choice of lens is the same, but I've created a completely different image by lowering the camera angle to use the coastline.

This introduces the shoreline, with interest coming from the dark rocky shoreline, mixed with the breaking waves, and highlights from the weak sunshine on the broken surf.

Image Three - south west coast path Blackstone Point 13mm lens

Image Three is taken with the 13mm ultra-wide lens on the iphone.

In the moments between pictures, the cloud has moved, and allowed the sun to light up the foreground, which together with the much greater image inclusion changes the balance and feel of the image completely.

There's nothing inherently wrong with any image, and I'd be interested to know which you prefer.