Amazingly, given my previous track record with New Year resolutions, I managed to achieve all of the challenges whilst staying in Burnham-on-Sea in early February. I chose the lighthouse as a subject for the dawn photography and took the opportunity to compare my Canon 5D (mkii) with the handheld mirrorless M6 camera. These were my findings.
Firstly, I when I started out it felt that I was going on some sort of expedition weighed down by equipment. It had been over two years since I packed a full camera bag and tripod and it felt awkward and heavy. Also Burnham Lighthouse was not totally new to me. I had actually photographed it in the past when carry lots of equipment didn't seem a problem. When I looked up the date I was surprised to find that I was last there in February 2012 with my 5D, almost 8 years ago to the day - a total coincidence on the one hand but also a reminder about how old my 5D camera and lenses are.
The first shots with the DLSR and tripod were taken before sunrise, although there was plenty of dawn light bouncing around. This light seemed to skew the auto white balance, even to the point of me checking the settings. The result seemed heavily magenta biased. Later, in Lightroom I applied an adjustment taking a white point reading from the lighthouse. The original, the altered version, and one adjusted to my taste are shown below:
Following this, I walked the tripod around the lighthouse to capture the conditions and to vary the shots - I have not adjusted the white balance for any of these images:
Overall, I found the tripod and camera a bit cumbersome and ridged - useful of course for the low light - but after a while I was thinking that I was missing the creativity and flexibility of handholding the camera. This was particularly noticeable when I processed the results. I was broadly happy with lighthouse shots but when I looked into the compositions I could see what I had missed. The real picture, for me, wasn't the lighthouse itself, it was somewhere in the reflection as shown in the area highlighted below:
Later, once I have exhausted the tripod shots, I moved back to the handheld camera and did start to capture some the lighthouse reflections. In doing so, it highlighted how my photography has changed since the visit in 2012. On that occasion everything I took was 'wide angle' on a tripod. If I did see anything else I didn't record it at the time and was seemingly happy to stand and wait for changes to the light. Now in 2020, I felt a bit lost after half a dozen lighthouse shots on a tripod and was looking for a more dynamic alternative.
Picking up the Canon M6, my first handheld shot was a simple composition of reflected cloud and mud! In my opinion, this image says as much about early morning light as the wide angle landscapes might. The reflection and mud communicates something about the place and then requires viewer to make up the rest, whereas the full wide angle landscape shows just about everything there is to see. In this way, the former is interesting and the later is nice to look at - although I accept there will be differing views on this point:
One noticeable downside of handholding a camera for low light landscapes is the need to push the ISO. This introduces noise, a digital graininess which is often a spoiler to the final results. The first landscapes with the M6 camera are grainy even after some correction in Lightroom. This doesn't particularly show in this format but it would if printed at full size:
As the light changed, I did go back to the DLSR and tripod for a final couple of shots. This offered an opportunity to directly compare the results from the two cameras. The brief sunlight on the lighthouse and the sandbar behind also allowed me to reduce the ISO for a handheld exposure. These were the two results with the only difference being a slight shift in the colour temperature:
All in all, the dawn trip to Burnham Lighthouse was an interesting experience.
Having a once expensive DSLR kit sat in the cupboard was niggling away at me. I had always considered full frame sensors as the quality end of photography but technology has now moved on and so has my photography. The top end of quality is now many megapixels beyond my 5D and the M6 seems to suite my current photographic needs. It can accommodate all my Canon lenses and I can, of course, use it with a tripod in low light. That said, I am not dismissing the 5D quickly and will plan my next major outing with a full kit bag!
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