Tag: Rocks

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Look What You're Missing!

As the days get longer I’m finding it increasingly difficult to get up for sunrise shoots.  I’m not sure that there’s really a cure for that other than sheer dogged determination to get up and get going, something I was reminded the other day as being the hallmark of a true professional.  It’s not hard to understand the motivation to get up and get going when you are often treated to glorious sunrises such as the one I was greeted with on a recent visit to what has become one of my favorite beaches.  This shot and others like it are posted in prominent places around my home and every morning I don’t get up for a morning shoot they scream ‘look what you’re missing!’.

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Morning Light

I’ve been continue to work on photographing the seashore and in particular rocks in the water.  As summer approaches sunrise gets ever earlier, making it increasing unlikely that I will hit my self imposed goal of being on location an hour before sunrise.  I enjoy being on location while it is still dark and waiting for the right light.  On this particular morning I was on location 30 minutes before sunrise, with it being almost sunrise by the time I got a shot that I liked.  Once the sun appeared on the horizon I felt it was too bright to make the photographs that I was looking to make and I headed for home and breakfast.

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Rocks and a Sun Rise

I mentioned last week the process of virtual scouting that I use to help me find interesting places to photograph and to make sure that I am there at the right time of day to achieve the photograph that I am aiming for.  The image above was the result of spending an hour or so looking at the satellite map within google maps to find and interesting collection of rocks at the waters edge.  It was then a relatively simple task to work out what days I could expect clear morning skies and what the tide would be on those days.  I arrived here when it was still quite dark.  As the sky became lighter I was able to get a better sense of the beach and how I might photograph it.  Starting on the beach I made a series of images that had me getting closer and closer to the water until the final set, of which the above was the best, where I was stood on the rocks in the breaking surf.

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Virtual Scouting

I was recently describing my process of scouting locations to one of my friends and their response made me think that it would be worth sharing here.  My process is evolving but here is how I’m currently approaching things.

I’ve been working on a project to photograph rocks at the waters edge.  My first move was to find some places where there may be suitable rocks.  For this I turned to google maps in the satellite view and at a decent magnification scanned the coast line close to home. Here’s a screen shot from google maps:

Once I’d found a good location such as the one above I plugged the location into the photographers ephemeris an iPhone app.  The app lets me work out the location of sunrise and sunset.  I realize that I could probably use The Photographer’s Ephemeris to fill the same function as google maps, and I may well transition over at some point, but I feel like I have more screen real estate with google maps than I can have with The Photographer’s Ephemeris.  Here’s a screen shot to from the PC version of the Photographer’s Ephemeris that can be found here.

Since I’m dealing with the ocean I check on the tide table to see whether it will be high tide or low tide.  There are lots of resources for this information.  Because it’s handy I generally use the iPhone app Tides.  There may be better applications for this available but this is easy and it works for me.

Then finally I check the weather using either the 10 day or hourly forecast on the weather channel website.

I’ve tried winging it many times and I’ve had spotty success.  With the process described above I’ve had a little more consistent success.

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Sunrise on Glacial Erractics

One of the beaches that we went to when I first moved to Boston’s south shore is littered with large rocks.   They are an odd sight on an otherwise normal shoreline and were certainly something of a curiosity for me, having never seen anything like them before.  They are  glacial erratics, rocks that are out of place in terms of size and shape for the other rocks found in that area and that were transported as part of a glacier.  I’m quite taken with these as subjects for my photos, which means I’ll return frequently until I’ve had my fill.  It could be quite a while.

On this particular morning I had been trying out some wider views.  I walked away to see whether I could get an image of a single rock and as I walked back down the beach I saw the image shown above.