Going back to London Bridge down in Portsea

A few weeks ago, I went to Portsea to see London Bridge with a friend. While I always have my long exposure gear and tripod with me, I left them in the car for that trip. I asked another friend if she would go back with me so I could take photos at sunset. We had been there a lot earlier the first time.

She agreed, and we headed a week or so back.

I wasn’t sure we would get a sunset, I mean, you are never guaranteed one. While we did get something, it wasn’t brilliant. You spend all that time waiting for the sun to go down, then it does, and nothing happens. Once it goes down, that is when all the colour is meant to appear, but it didn’t. We did wait a while, but in the end we left.

This image is a long exposure, and it was taken with the Formatt Hitech 10 stop ND filter, and the exposure was 13 seconds. It was short enough that the clouds didn’t move too much, but long enough to settle the water some. I like that you can see the movement of the water.

I did use ON1 Photo Raw 2025 to process this, and I quite like the way it has come out. The more I use it, the more I understand and realise what I can do. I know you can just use the presets, but really, for this I wanted to try doing the image without them, which I managed to do. I did what I wanted and got what I wanted.

Then there were some images that I took just before the sun set, and it was shining out. I don’t know if that is the right way of saying it, but it did create some sunflares, and I liked them. So I chose one to process.

This next image is also a long exposure, still with the same filter, but this one was a 40 second exposure. The water is a lot calmer because of it, or so it would seem.

I did a lot more to this, but this time I used Affinity Photo 2. I’m still trying to work it out, but so far I do like what is possible. I like how it turned out.

When I go on trips like this, I do like to take two of my 3 Legged Thing tripods with me. Bucky is a smaller and lighter tripod, perfect if there isn’t a lot of wind, but if there is, then Winston is a much better choice. The latter is a heavier tripod and perfect in those conditions. We stopped off at another beach on the way, and I tried using Bucky, but it was so windy. I knew when I got to London Bridge I would need to use Winston. It was a really good move.

I took some photos of my camera on the tripod and I’m going to share them with them. You can see where I was standing as well. I will put them in a gallery with the above two images as well. I hope you like seeing that.