I was in the Outer Banks this past February. In the town of Duck. On the morning I took this there were storms forecasted for pretty much the entire day. I decided to get up for sunrise and head out to the beach behind our place. Hoping that there would be some dramatic clouds/skies due to the storms rolling in.
The first challenge I faced with this was finding a foreground element. I was hoping to find some cool shells or driftwood or just something interesting to put in the foreground and there was nothing.
Then, at some point these gorgeous pink clouds started to roll in. I knew they were not going to last long so I started assembling my ND filter kit as fast as I could. I got it hooked up in time for one 2ish minute exposure. After that the clouds were pretty much gone. Luckily I nailed the exposure for the clouds.
Knowing I couldn't use JUST the image of the clouds, because the rest of everything was just a blurry mess, I decided to move the camera from where I was and get close to the water and use the rushing waves as my foreground element. I switched from my 10stop ND to a 3 or 6, I don't remember, and shot several 1/3 to 1/4 second exposures until I got some cool water textures that I was satisfied with.
Finally I brought the 2ish minute exposure for the clouds and my favorite water texture image into photoshop and combined them together. Despite moving the camera, it was very easy to combine the sky with the water as there aren't really any other objects besides the sky and water in the frame.
At first I was really disappointed with the situation due to there only being an empty beach. No cool objects or anything really to use for a foreground. But once I got the images onto the computer I was able to create probably one of my all time favorite images. It's funny how things work out sometimes.