Tag: Ocean

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Lucy Vincent Beach

I’m on Martha’s Vineyard this week to attend Alison Shaw’s photography workshop. The weather has been good but we’ve lacked the spectacular sunrises and sunsets so far his week. One of the things that going out regardless of the weather is that it pushes you to go beyond the bounds of what you might think are conditions needed for great photographs. I’ve bumped up against this a couple of times already this year and again for our evening at Lucy Vincent beach. There was a decent amount of cloud cover and it got foggy as the evening wore on. The image below was my favorite from the ones that I’ve reviewed so far.

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Wide Angle Distortion – Does this Lens Make me Look Fat?

Over Labor Day weekend I spent some time playing with my regular lens walk around lens, Canon’s 24-104, but using it at the wide angle setting. I know that wide angle lenses can cause distortion and have particularly noticed curved horizons as the a byproduct of working with the wide angle. Converging verticals and keystoning are also other hallmarks of a wide angle lens.

I’ve read all this in books but hadn’t really internalized it until I made this image:

Sort of annoying because I wanted to include a big open sky.

Keeping the sensor parrallel to the lighthouse resulted in this:

A little better. When I got this home I used the function within lightroom to correct for the lens used and got this image:

I looked at this for a while but couldn’t put my finger on what was the problem with it. Then it dawned on me. Correcting for lens distortion made the lighthouse ‘chunkier’ than it actually seems in real life. There’s a lesson for all of us in that – be careful with automatic settings. They work great the majority of the time but not always.

I finally decided on how I wanted the image to look and came up with this:

Tons of fun and some good lessons.

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Sunrise Surprise

I had two surprises last week at my favorite beach for sunrise photography. I had probably been photographing for 15 mins when I noticed that there was a fire further up the beach – it was still quite dark at 5 am and so hard to miss. As I looked closer I realized that there was someone sat at the fire and so I didn’t feel a pressing need to rush over to investigate further. I did have a chance to chat later – it was someone on the first night of their vacation so excited to be at the coast that they wanted to be sure they saw the sunrise and were keeping themselves warm while they waited. As it got lighter I also realized that there was a sailboat anchored in the cove and I rushed over to take the shot above. While it’s hard to tell from this image, the sailboat was probably in about 12 inches of water and must have been on the bottom at low tide. I’m not sure what kind of boat can stand that treatment but it made a nice change.

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Island Bound

I’m getting ready to head off for a long weekend at the beach again.  It feels like one last summer adventure before Autumn gets her grips into  us.  I’m hoping for clear skies so that I can work more on my project capturing still things such as rocks in moving water like the image above.  This image was taken at the beach earlier in the summer during a longer stay that I had.  I got up early many mornings, taking full advantage of the fact that since I was only moments away from the beach I could get precious extra minutes in bed.  I generally like to arrive well before sunrise and generally shoot until sunrise.  I like the amount and quality of the pre-dawn light which allows me to easily blur the water as I did here.  This morning I once again learned the lesson that you need to be very careful when shooting around water – a rogue wave soaked me to the skin, fortunately I got my camera safely out of the water, and though I was a little shaken up I continued on shooting to get the image above.

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With Landscape in Mind

I recently bought Eddie Ephraums’s book ‘Joe Cornish: A photographer at work‘, which documents Joe Cornish’s approach to photographer. It’s fun to see what Joe achieves with a compact camera, using that as a sketchbook to try out ideas before setting up his main camera. I was very excited to see that Environment films had followed up this idea with documentary film.  Check out the trailer below:

With Landscape in Mind (TRAILER) from ENVIRONMENT FILMS on Vimeo.