Standing on the pebble harbour beach at Portholland, Cornwall, looking east out to sea. The headland in the distance is Dodman Point.

I go on holiday with the family here each year. I had just had my first DSLR for all of a week so the learning curve was steep and lots of mistakes were made :). This was late in the afternoon/early evening, a miserable, grey, nondescript, slightly choppy sort of day, so I went out and bracketed with long exposures (this was 8 seconds). This smoothes out the sea and waves lapping over the rocks and makes for an interesting effect in the water. I also had some ND grad filters stacked to reduce the sky on there.

The RAW came out totally overexposed so I pulled the exposure value back a lot. From a technical point of view there are various flaws with it (no detail in some of the darks etc, bit more of a halo there than I'd really like) BUT I do actually think it works because it's got mood. On the plus side I like the tones in the water, the reflection/lighting is interesting and it's got a certain 'solidity' about it that I can't quite put my finger on.