A few days on Öland and visits to Neptuni åkrar | Notes

During the trip to Öland I visited Neptuni åkrar twice. The first time was already after sunset - there was little to see, but the sky reflecting in the water pooled in the rock grooves looked otherworldly. That is why we decided to go back, this time still before sunset. Looking back, that felt like the right call, given how spectacular that evening’s sunset turned out to be.

The seaward part of Neptuni åkrar is limestone rock washed constantly by the sea. The rocks are covered with countless traces (unfortunately only traces now) of trilobites and orthoceras.

Fossil imprints, almost perfectly straight cracks in the rock, standing “puddles” of water, and a few centimetres of ledge here and there - for me that is an ideal place for a sunset and slow seascape photography. The problem is that there are too many motifs. Finding a better frame every few moments, I risked missing the moment when the rays start grazing the tops of the rocks. I really had to hold myself back from changing position every minute.

Approach, conditions, and technique

The situation

The sky that day put on an equally strong show. Clouds arranged in an S shape, plus smaller groups of cloud, made a striking picture overhead.

And then the problem appears. I latched onto a hollow that formed an uneven contour waving deeper into the frame, together with a second hollow making a kind of passage to the sea. And then there was that sky… The sun was entering the frame from the left, drifting slightly north. The clouds moved the same way. When I set the frame so that the S in the sky reflected perfectly in the water, in theory all that remained was to wait for the tops to be grazed by light. Meanwhile the clouds kept slipping toward the edge of the hollow. I recomposed maybe ten times before I finally made the shot.

Setup

The basic setup here is camera, tripod, and filters. Photographing a sunset most often calls for a tripod - not always for stability as such, but for consistency across individual frames. I often shoot a series of nearly identical exposures with different focus points, in case I later need a sharp “stack”. The second reason for a tripod is the more obvious one: stabilisation for long exposures (sometimes 10 s, though I have gone as long as 5 min; I will leave the technicalities of that process for another note). Filters - yes, I use them, and I do not think a polariser is the only one a photographer needs. A filter kit complicates fieldwork, but it saves a lot of time in post. I also find ND and GND filters extremely useful in the field. For this frame a CPL was out: I wanted a strong reflection of the clouds in the water, and a polariser is exactly what suppresses those reflections. An ND1000 made no sense either - the water in the hollows was so still that a long exposure would not have “smoothed” anything further.

One photograph - many ideas

That evening I made several dozen frames, but honestly only a handful stand out as finished pictures. I decided to take one of them and edit it in several different ways. I will probably share the rest in another note.

The photograph was made from a tripod with a graduated neutral-density filter fitted.

Edit variants

This is where it gets interesting. I decided to go a bit wild and edit this photograph in several different ways:

bright, with clearly marked rock texture
darker, with softer highlights and a more natural foreground
with colour grading applied
black and white
driven by a language model

Each edit included an element that reduced the effect of the graduated filter, and in practically every case I lifted the shadows a little.

Have a look at the results - I hope one of them lands. I am curious which.

Where we start

This is the raw frame converted to JPEG:

Raw unedited sunset frame at Neptuni åkrar

First edit - bright colour frame

I wanted to show the warm highlights on the rocks and a little of their texture. So I emphasised the foreground and the clouds, and held back the brightness of the sun a little - without artificially boosting the colours. I also worked a little on the puddle.

Bright colour sunset edit emphasising rock texture and cloud reflection — Bright colour version. In my view visually very appealing, and in a way close to how the place looked to the naked eye.

Second edit - darker foreground

The second version builds a little on the first, but here I wanted a darker frame and a gentler treatment of the highlights. Fewer details jump out at once; a darker foreground looks more natural to me.

Darker sunset edit with a quieter foreground — Even though detail is harder to separate in the dark parts of this image - especially on a display meant for editing - I think the foreground better shows the reflections of warm sunlight on the uneven surface.

Graded version

Here colour grading comes into play. I do not do this very often, but why not - maybe it is time to leave the comfort zone.

Main editing decisions:

shadows toward blue
midtones toward orange
highlights a little more than the midtones, in the same direction
in the colour mixer, lower saturation and luminance for oranges and yellows; oranges nudged slightly toward yellow

Colour-graded sunset edit with cool shadows and warm midtones — I went a bit wild with colour here, but even though the result is candy-like, I still think it works.

Black-and-white version

Here the goal was atmosphere.

Contrast up, vignette, darken the sky. The effect was meant to leave a little doubt as to whether what we see in the frame is a setting sun - or a rocket lifting off.

Black-and-white sunset edit with strong contrast and vignette — A version that leaves a little more unsaid

Bonus track. LLM edit

Finally I asked AI how this photograph should be edited for Instagram. Have a look and judge the result yourselves:

Here is the prompt I used to get editing guidance from Gemini 3.1 Pro:

This is a raw sunset photograph from Öland.
I use Lightroom and want to edit it so it looks great on Instagram.
Take on the role of an editor and suggest which Lightroom tool settings to use and which layers to apply.

LLM-suggested Instagram-oriented edit of the Öland sunset

In my view the AI went a bit over the top. For me the photograph became indigestible in its colour saturation - kitschy. On the other hand, as a picture it is very pretty.