I shot this on the beach at Coronado Island, just down from The Del. The sun had already gone down and I was trying to get what I could. I learned several things: 1) You're not as far away from the waves as you think you are, so be careful where you set your camera bag; 2) while you'll sometimes get lucky, good shots require planning, particularly when the light changes quickly (shooting in manual mode, I was changing the exposure about every 5 seconds); and 3) the graduated neutral density filter (3-stop hard filter in this shot) ranks right up there with the guitar capo as one of the greatest inventions, dollar for dollar, of all time.
For the curious, here's the EXIF data:
Nikon D80
Sigma 10-20 at 14mm
f/16
1.3 seconds
ISO 400 (don't ask me why)
Manual exposure
All in all, pretty colors, but I think there are some technical issues. Depth of field is pretty good, but the shutter speed blurs the waves to an unacceptable degree. A faster shutter speed would have required higher ISO (more noise in an already dark picture) and/or larger aperture (bye bye, depth of field). If I had to do it over, I'd have lowered the ISO, used something like f/8 and focused on the waves to freeze them a bit, since there's really no detail in the main subject (the glow way out at Point Loma). I probably should have used a 2-stop soft grad instead of the 3-stop hard grad I used (even though I like the result with the 3-stop) because the 2-stop might have allowed me to use a faster shutter speed.
Live and learn.
2 comments:
Wow, these are some great photos. You should give up golf altogether now that you've found a hobby you're good at!!! Ha!
No kidding. Don't think I haven't considered it. I suspect that it's a little more difficult to take pictures and drink beer than it is to play golf and drink beer. I can play bad golf regardless of whether I've been drinking. Maybe I should get tanked and shoot some pictures just to test the theory.
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