Agarve Wind Farms Win 3rd Place for
Architecture: Industrial Pro Category
Photographing wind farms was on my ‘To Do’ photography list, so when I planned my trip to Portugal I was happy to find out that wind farms are spotted all over the country on mountaintops.
Although I kept seeing them from the bus and train, I hadn’t rented a car and therefore thought that my wind farms would have to wait for another occasion. On the last stretch of my two weeks in Portugal, I headed down south to the Algarve region for some R & R, but laying on the beach I saw the clouds roll in and I just couldn’t let this opportunity pass. I packed my stuff off the beach and headed to the nearest car rental place and headed to the mountains.
In my mind I envisioned taking a daytime long exposure of these majestic creatures as fine art and using three different exposures:
The result you can see below:
Wind Farm #1
Wind Farm #1 is superimpose of two images: a daytime long exposure and a quick shutter for the rotor, catching the movement of the rotor (as I thought in exposure #3) just didn’t seem to come out as I envisioned since the clouds came out as a still shot too.
Technical info of Wind Farm #1 Image 1:
Daytime long exposure, Shutter speed of 94.8 seconds 1.3 minutes
Aperture F-11, at 18 mm (DX sensor)
I placed two ND filters, a 10 stop and a 3 stop for a total of 13 f-stops
Later in the ‘Digital Darkroom’ I converted the image to black and white.
Wind Farm #2 is just one shot with a semi long exposure, the first turbine’s rotor was spinning very slow for some reason so I managed to catch the movement of the rotor as well as the clouds with one shot.
Wind Farm #2
Technical info of Wind Farm #2:
Daytime long exposure, Shutter speed of 242 seconds 4 minutes
Aperture F-16, at 60 mm (DX sensor)
I placed two ND filters, a 10 stop and a 3 stop for a total of 13 f-stops
Later in the ‘Digital Darkroom’ I converted the image to black and white.