I never thought about this until a few months after taking this photo, but this long exposure photo seems almost surreal and abstract. There’s no special effects applied to it, just some simple colour enhancements in Lightroom and a little bit of smoke removal from the horizon.
If you look at this photo for a while, you almost convince yourself that you don’t really know what you’re looking at. The dark blue areas within the water are merely waves caught in a long exposure while the beautiful gradient of the sky is smooth because there wasn’t a single cloud that morning.
This photo is in fact a sunrise photo taken just before the sun rose above the horizon, in front of a lake. The long exposure makes the water in the foreground blurred and surreal, while the overall colour of the photo enhances this feeling. The full 8.0 seconds was achieved with a 6-stop ND filter (B+W) attached to my 24-70 f/2.8 lens. Otherwise, I would have easily blown out the highlight areas of the photo.
I’m almost tempted to go back and do this with a 10-stop ND filter. Now, if it wasn’t for the cold!