First Sunny Sunday of Spring

The weather has influenced this beach in many ways.

Five years ago the spot where the tripod stands would have been in the middle of the sand hills, which used to extend to about the high tideline where the line of black seaweed runs along the beach.

Storms and high tides over recent years have eroded the sand hills.

The panorama was shot on Sunday 22nd March - the first sunny Sunday of Spring. The cars in the car park have mostly come from Derry. This is the nearest beach to Derry city. So it is the first choice for day trippers, who have had their Sunday lunch and now want a walk on the beach. They too have had an erosive effect on the sand hills both directly by walking across them and indirectly by driving here in internal combustion engine cars adding to greenhouse gases and accelerating global climate change.

The tide is a long way out. The panorama opens looking North along Lough Swilly to the North Atlantic. On the right (Eastern coast of Lough Swilly) are the Urris hills across Lough Swilly (on its Western shore) Is Knockalla Mountain. As the panorama rotates to the left we look South West towards Inch Island. Past Inch we see the traffic on the main road from Derry to Buncrana beyond it is Gollan Hill.

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Europe / Ireland

Lat: 55° 5' 54.25" N
Long: 8° 29' 45.92" W

Elevation: 0

→ maps.google.com [EXT]

Precision is: High. Pinpoints the exact spot.

The source images were taken with a Canon EOS 5D Mk II, Canon EF 15mm f/2.8 Fisheye lens.

The camera was mounted on a Kaiden Kiwi panorama adapter on a Manfrotto 190XDB tripod with a Bushman Monopole extension lifting the camera to about three metres.

A sky shot and six shots, tilted slightly below the horizontal, were taken. These were at 60° intervals. A ground shot was also taken. Each "shot" consisted of three bracketed exposures from +2 to -2 stops. (The exposures were at shutter speeds: 1/250, 1/100, 1/40 all at an aperture of f/16.)

A total of 27 separate images were combined using Hugin (which in turn invokes Nona, Enfuse and Enblend) in order to achieve this High Dynamic Range type result.