I was raised in the UK but now live in Canada. It took a second vacation to Scotland and the North East for me to have an opportunity to take the photo, or several hundred, of this iconic lighthouse that I wanted. I had seen the shot on a friend’s website and had tried to visit on an earlier vacation, but the tide wasn’t favourable. The photos I got were okay but not what I was after.

For the second trip back a year later, I planned my arrival around the high tide in the morning after I arrived at Whitley Bay. I scouted and took shots on my arrival before getting some interesting blue hour shots, and then I left hoping for the right conditions in the morning. I awoke to a cloudy, overcast day with light rain. Thinking that was ok, I headed out and got to the right spot to get this composition, then waited for the tide to get high enough to cover the foreground and cause the posts to become surrounded.

The photo I wanted was a long exposure, around eight minutes, to capture those long, drawn-out, streaky skies. Using my Lee Filters App and calculating backwards, I determined that I needed my 15-stop filter. So, I fitted that to the front, put black electrical tape over all the possible light leakage points, and took the shot. I also played with longer and shorter exposures to see how the clouds looked. I preferred the eight-minute shot.

After returning home to Canada, I did a reasonable amount of post-processing to make the image look like the finished one.