Soft Light, Soft Water

Long exposure after sunset, looking at the Ocean Beach Pier.

I love long exposures! There's a bit of mystery in long exposures as you can never tell exactly what you're going to end up with. You can guess and try to envision the effects of the increased exposure time, but you'll never know for sure until you see it on you LCD screen after the shutter closes.

Case in point, this photo was a 30 second exposure about 30 minutes after sunset. It was taken the same night as End of the Day and the image for 12 Minutes Makes a World of Difference, back in mid-April. As I set up for the shot, the sky was already a deep dark blue, edging quickly towards black but I knew the long exposure time would allow my camera's sensor to pick up the last remaining bits of color in the sky. What I didn't know was that I would end up with such nice, soft pastel colors in the sky.

I also expected the waves would be smoothed out quite a bit. My hope was that I wouldn't lose all definition in the ocean, but I couldn't have predicted the reflection of the pier's lights on the smoothed out waves. The reflections of the lights wasn't apparent to the naked eye that night, probably because of the motion of the waves, but once the motion was taken out of the equation, those reflections were allowed to shine.

12 Minutes Makes a World of Difference

Just after sunset at Ocean Beach

Taken just 12 short minutes after the image in my last post, End of the Day, this image has a completely different look to it. With the sun now completely below the horizon, what was a 1 second exposure for End of the Day became an 8 second exposure for this image.

The added exposure time allowed the waves to blur even more than the previous image. At this exposure length, the majority of the waves and motion in the water has been smoothed out and is nearly unrecognizable. The effect is somewhere in between the two points where I'd like it to be. In End of the Day, the waves show quite a bit of motion blur but still hold definition. At the other end of the spectrum is Only One Way Out, an older image that shows the effect of a 7 minute (yup, minute!!) exposure. The water is completely smoothed out and lacks any real definition. Those two extremes are where I'd typically like the water to be in all of my images.

However, I don't mind the in between look in this image because this image is more about the different conditions in such a short amount of time after the last one. Notice the sky color, no longer a golden, burning orange. With the sun now well below the horizon the sky has picked up a nice pinkish glow. Also notice the rocks in the foreground. They aren't the exact same rocks, of course, as I moved and found a new composition in those 12 minutes, but look at the difference in the color of the rocks. In the previous image they glow and reflect the sky's golden orange. These rocks, without the direct angular sunlight, look much more menacing and uninviting.

While this image is quite a bit colder and may not be as "pretty" as the previous one, I propose that it is no less interesting. It's amazing how much a scene can change in just 12 minutes...

End of The Day

End of the Day - Sunset at Ocean Beach

I shot this image about a week and a half ago on the first evening my friend Jay was in town. We grabbed a quick bite to eat at Southbeach so Jay could try their legendary fish tacos then took the short walk to the beach to shoot the sunset.

The beach part of Ocean Beach isn't much to write home about photographically speaking. It's more or less just a sandy beach. But just a bit south of the pier, the beach quickly turns to pock-marked sandstone. That's good news for a couple photographers looking for interesting foreground subject matter. With the sun low in the sky, the sandstone picks up an amazing golden glow. When the sun is very low (as it is in the image on the right), only the top ridges pick up that glow, creating an interesting contrast between the lit up ridges and the rest of the rock.

This is a single image, no multiple exposures or blending or even Photoshop trickery. What you see here is largely what came out of my camera. I achieved this single exposure by using my graduated neutral density filter along with a graduated blue filter. Placing the darker regions of the filters over the sky allowed me to effectively darken the sky enough to capture the sky and relatively dark foreground all in one exposure. Typically, only the graduated neutral density filter would be used for this purpose, however I've found that no matter how "neutral" the filter is supposed to be, there is still a noticeable color shift when using it. The blue graduated filter doesn't reduce the exposure by much, but it does tend to shift the colors back towards reality.

Reducing the exposure for the sky, meant using a longer shutter speed to get the proper exposure. That's something I see as a happy side effect, especially along the coast. With a quick shutter speed, the water is frozen in place, but the longer exposure allows the water to show its motion. The wispy, flowing water shown is the result of longer exposure and begins to hint at the forces of nature that shape this part of the California coast.

High Tide at La Jolla Cove

Waves crashing on the rocky shore at La Jolla Cove

Tides are good for business. That is, if your business is photographing the coast. Particularly good when it's a very low or very high tide at sunset. In between tides and even normal high or low tides are average at best, photographically speaking. Even at sunset, they lack drama or uniqueness because they are so common. But the extremely low and high tides associated with the full moon are another beast all together. During extremely low tides reveal rocks formally hidden beneath the waves and the high tides bring waves that batter the coast with a brutal intensity.

This image, from my California Coastline gallery, was taken during high tide at La Jolla Cove. While these coastal rocks normally do get wet during an average high tide, the extreme high tide brought an energy I had yet to see here. To shoot this image, I chose a slow shutter speed, to allow the crashing waves to blur and show their movement and energy. This technique is not an exact science and I've found the best way to bring home a great image is to choose a composition, then choose the shutter speed that allows for the best movement in the waves and finally to just lock the shutter down for a while. The result is normally quite a few similar photos to sift through, but the payoff of finding that one image with just the right wave splash in it is more than worth it!

Stand Behind Line

Stand Behind Line

I'm not sure why Google Maps is choosing to show the location for this image as "Core - Columbia, San Diego, CA," but this image was shot at One American Plaza in downtown San Diego. The plaza houses a fairly busy hub for the MTS Trolleys, San Diego's above-ground subway solution, and was the perfect location to shoot for a recent photography forum contest entitled Transportation.

As soon as the contest was posted, I envisioned an image similar to this one, a red trolley flashing by with that uber-cool ribbed, arching roof showing above and through the flash. Various compositions, angles and shutter speeds were attempted with the sole purpose of capturing just the perfect frame to match the vision I had.

A few hundred frames (mostly because these types of long exposures can be so unpredictable in their results) yielded a nice crop of keepers, but this one here stood above the rest. It was the one frame that matched my vision completely and had the add bonus of titling itself.