One of the great things about shooting trips to Dorset is that there are so many fantastic locations all around you. For this particular shoot, I initially wanted to go to Mupe Rocks near Lulworth Cove but it is closed on Monday at this time of year for the MOD to practice blowing things up, so it is not really the kind of place for a hapless photographer to go wandering.

After finding this out and with the weather getting worse I thought I would make a return trip to Durdle Door with it’s famous arch which could have been right for a mid-arch sunrise sparkle at this time of year if the weather had been good or a moody cloudy sky in a black and white shot if the predicted gray could rolled on in. However, on leaving the house at 6 ish, I saw a glorious sky full of stars and everything covered in sparkly frost – just right for a trip to Corfe Castle, so off I went with a spring in my step.

Unfortunately, while I was on my way the weather forecasters reminded the clouds of what they should have been doing, so rather than another non-sunrise at Corfe I headed over the Peveril Point at Swanage. This is just 15 minutes and a short walk away where I was greeted by some great jagged spines of rock stretching out in to the sea. (I will not mention the fact that I had to pay to park there even at 7 am on freezing cold Monday morning in the middle of winter)

The best thing is that all of these locations are within about 30 minutes of one another so whatever the weather: Dorset has you covered. What I wanted to capture in these images was the soft essence of the water on the rocks in a gentle diffused light and the juxtaposition of the rocks slicing through the sea and reaching on outwards.

To achieve these result I used a medium length lens, my Canon 24-70 f2.8 L on an EOS 50D body, tripod mounted and some ND filters. This gave me a long exposure and I shot from high up. I also chose to exclude the sky from this shot because it was not really part of the story and detracted from the overall feeling of the shot rather than enhancing it. Both shots were primarily processed in Adobe Lightroom 3.