Saturday, March 2, 2024
Welcome back! If you missed it, I have started this trek off in a previous blog. If you haven’t read it yet, I’ll be happy to wait for you.
No seriously, you need to read the first day to this trek.
I’m not kidding, just go and check it out.
Oh….I guess you will need a link to it won’t you? My bad….sorry. Here you go.
Now that we are all caught up, we can start the first full day of the trek. After what can only be described as an epic beginning, I was all set to capture a sunrise over the Atlantic. Over the years, this has become my routine while at the beach. I set the clock to get up early and I go out well before the light starts in the sky. If things would only go so smooth.
When I was going to sleep, I saw that the weather for the morning was forecasted to be rainy, and that rain was supposed to continue through the day. My hope was that by the morning, the rain was going to hold off leaving cloudy skies with a chance of color. Even without color, I was hoping for some blue hour photography with the moody clouds over the ocean. Even with that hope, I really hadn’t thought things through very well. My plan was to go to Jeanette’s Pier which was just a few miles down the road. I had stopped and scoped it out on Friday night, but hadn’t really put a lot of thought into it beyond that.
I had my clock set to go off at 5am so that I could evaluate the weather and make any final decisions on a destination. Before my clock rang, I already had an idea that things were not going to go well. I remember being woken up by a steady clicking which turned out to be the rain falling off of the roof and hitting the A/C unit around 3am. From that point on, it was an unsettling sleep with the incessant dripping keeping me awake. When the clock did finally go off, I opened up the weather app and looked. It was raining currently, and had been for hours. It was looking like it would continue through 10 or 11am. Since I could hear the rain inside, I knew that it was too hard to go out with the camera. I just rolled back over and went back to sleep for a little while longer.
I woke up for breakfast at 6am and went to have my fill of the continental breakfast that was being offered. I was back in the room shortly after 6:30 when I started to make plans for the day. Looking at the weather forecast, the entirety of the Out Banks was going to be socked in until about lunch time when the rain would stop and the clouds would start to break up.
I knew that this was going to be a possibility with the weather being as unstable as it was. I used the time to look at the maps and start trying to find some subjects that I might want to shoot when the weather let up. Every time I looked at the hourly forecast though, the clearing was being pushed further and further back. I could hear folks talking in the hall about how it was going to rain all day long and that some were even going to check out early because they couldn’t get out to do anything.
It was at this point that I was very happy that I had those initial 33 frames on the camera from the day before because there was every chance that the first day here was going to be a complete wash photographically. I talked to Toni a few times and let her know my predicament and even showed her photos through the raindrop covered window I shot with the cell phone. She kept saying that this would make a nice composition, but it certainly wasn’t what I was after as a photograph. I dismissed the suggestion because I didn’t want to force a photo just to do something with the camera. However, the longer I sat by the window looking outside, the more I started to enjoy the scene. When the rain would cover the glass, it gave the outside an abstract look that I liked, and I started moving my head around to see different compositions. Of course, this is a technique that I teach my mentorship clients when the are learning composition. It is a great way of training your mind to work through elements and I still do it to this day. In this situation, I was starting to see some compositional possibilities, and could see what Toni liked about the scene. With nothing else looking promising, I went out to the truck to get the tripod which took just a couple of minutes. In that time, I got drenched just going out for that simple task but now I had everything that I needed to make a photo in the room.
It took me a very long time to get the tripod set up because it needed to be close to the window for the composition to work. The problem was that there was a bed that overlapped the window’s position on the wall by roughly a third. I had to get very creative with the tripod legs while having two of them on the mattress with the remaining one on the floor. This is not something that I recommend because you are losing stability. However, in this case, I really had no choice. In order to get the camera a few inches away, it was the only viable option. I needed it that close so that the house that I was fitting into the frame would physically fit in the window grid. Had I been further away, the house would have been bigger relatively speaking and wouldn’t have fit the right way in the grid.
When I finally got all that figured out, I mounted the camera and worked through the composition. Wouldn’t you know it, the camera was in the wrong position and I wasn’t able to get the composition that I wanted. About 10 minutes of working with the tripod was out the door. I ended up putting all three legs on the ground which was a better option anyway, and then extending the neck and then making it go horizontal. This allowed me to push the camera over the bed and into the right position. It was more clunky than the original position, but it allowed me to get pretty close to the composition that I had been after. The change was probably no more than eight inches from the original spot.
With a few more minutes of fine-tuning things and getting the focus set, I was ready to make some photos. There were more frames here than I would care to admit, but I wanted to make sure that I had the right depth of field since the photo wasn’t about the house that I had just spent the better part of 30 minutes composing in the frame. The photo was going to be about the rain drops on the window, and that was what I wanted to be in focus more than anything.
When I felt like I had the photo down, I broke the camera down and put it all back in the bag with the hopes that I would get to use it outside soon enough. Rember that I am writing this blog entry before I have even started to cull the images and I have no guarantee that any of the photos that I had just done actually worked. If one did, then you will already have seen it. If they didn’t, then the concept didn’t work at all.
Regardless, it was back to that favorite waiting game on the weather. At least the hourly forecast had settled on the system clearing out around 1pm. That was still a couple of hours away and I was getting tired of sitting in the room and looking out the window. Every time I would think that the rain had slacked off enough to allow me to go out with my umbrella mount to keep the lens dry it would increase quickly in intensity forcing me to remain in the room.
I think it was about 11am or so that I finally gave up and decided to go out and scout for some locations that might work when the rain did stop. I grabbed my gear and went to the truck. I pulled out in the road and headed North to check out the Avalon Pier and the Kitty Hawk Pier. My hope was that when the rain cleared out, the clouds that would be left behind would make for some great photos. For now, it was just a solid overcast with rain falling. The road was also quite flooded making travel difficult with rooster tails coming well over the hood and roof of the 4Runner, covering the windshield.
After I had visited both piers and decided that the Avalon Pier would be the best bet, I started to think about the possibility of the sky really showing off as the rain stopped and figured that I might stand a better chance at getting a large portion of the sky by visiting the Bodie Island Lighthouse. I already knew of a couple of compositions that would work well here, and they all included a large expanse of the sky.
I made the drive South to the lighthouse and watched the rain vary in intensity to the point that I actually started to get hopeful. When I arrived, it was just a drizzle, but it was a horizontal drizzle that would find its way onto the lens or filter much easier than I would have wanted. Figuring that the rain was going go give way soon enough, I grabbed my bag and tripod to go out and find the right composition.
I spent some time walking about the lighthouse and was around maybe four other people on the entire property. This was going to work out great because it is very hard photographing this lighthouse when there are a lot of people around as has happened in the past.
Eventually, I made my way onto the boardwalk and worked my way to the gazebo where I was looking for a composition. This was the area that I had planned on working, and it just so happened that the sky was starting to look interesting in that direction. The trick was finding the right spot to put the camera. I eventually located that spot where the structure was between two trees and the boardwalk brought the eyes right up to the lighthouse. It looked great, but the drizzle was still a problem for the lens and filters. It was fine enough that it was just being blown around which meant that the umbrella wouldn’t work. I lens hood might help though.
I had one in the truck along with an 82mm polarizer that would work inside the hood. Having a bit of time before the sky got right, I walked back and put the camera together under the liftgate for shelter. I opted for the 24-70mm lens because I felt that would offer all that I needed for the location. I cleaned up the screw-on filter and added the hood. I was able to use a lens cap with this arrangement as well which made walking back to the boardwalk quite easy. I had thought about leaving the bag since I was going to be blocking up a portion of the boardwalk with the tripod, but decided that I wanted to have the lens cloths available in case the rain got on my filter. I’m glad I thought about that because I had to clean the filter three times while shooting the lighthouse.
When I got to the location that I had scouted, I got the tripod set up. Even as far to the left as I could get it, there was still too much of the nearest section of the boardwalk in the photo. I took a page from my own book from the day before and straddled the railing with the left leg and the center column. This got the camera in the right position and provided a roughly stable environment for everything. In just the time that I was getting the composition set up, the filter was covered in mist and had to be cleaned off. I was very happy that I had the lens cloth for that.
I could see how this was going to go, so I used my boonie hat to block the rain from getting on the filter. This worked well but made it very difficult to adjust the composition and to make adjustments to the camera. I was making due though and was getting frames shot as the clouds started to break up. Of course, with the rain slowing down, more and more people started to arrive, and they were coming like clockwork past my location.
I noticed that the pattern was such that when one group would walk out of frame, there would be another group entering the frame. For those times when nobody was in the frame, there would be somebody walking by me causing the boardwalk to vibrate which would translate to the camera. I had to be very careful about when I made exposures to make sure that the photo was sharp and that there was nobody in the frame. This got more and more difficult as time went on.
I remember that after working this composition for a while, I wanted to back the camera up and get more of the curve of the boardwalk in. This was only going to be possible by using a portion of the railing where I had been standing. The rain had just about stopped so it was much easier to get things moved and set up again, but I still had to use my hat to shield it as it got covered with rain once again while I was setting the composition and the focus point.
Once I had everything dialed in and the filter was cleaned off, I started to make exposures. The first test shot was a tad overexposed as the sky was starting to break up nicely. I adjusted by a 1/3 of a stop and made another. It was at this point that I saw that a couple had entered the boardwalk. It was going to be a continuation of the game that I had been playing before, but it seemed that the flow of people was just too steady at this point. I was watching the sky opening up and providing some great light on the scene, but was unable to do anything about it because there was a constant stream of people coming by my location.
I was able to get a few frames shot here and there, but there was a lot more time sitting and waiting which was rather uncomfortable. I had the camera extended about as high as it would go and I had to hold the hat over that which was starting to make my arm ache.
As the light continued to get better, the flow of people continued to increase to the point that one couple passed me by and asked if I was getting any good photos. In almost a tantrum response, I said that the photo was going to be great but it was like making a left turn against 19 lanes on a highway with the people. Just at the moment that they cleared the frame I pointed to the next couple that was entering. I said that was how my luck had been going.
On the way back down from the gazebo, they stopped and asked if I had seen any luck at all since their last passing. Nope, still waiting to press the button for the next group of folks that came by. I think that they started to take pity on me as they stopped a family that was coming behind them from going past me and asked the guy walking up the boardwalk to come on out of my way. It was kind of amazing and something that I would have never done because each one of them had the same right to be there as I did. However, I saw my opportunity and shot the photo. Once the camera confirmed that I had it, I thanked everyone and sent them on their ways. As luck would have it, the one that I shot at this point is the one that you see directly above.
Seeing that the light was getting a bit harsh at this point, I decided to call it a day here. The sky was getting more interesting, but the contrast in the scene was getting to be more than I wanted to deal with. I had been here for about an hour working basically the same composition, so I had plenty of shots to cull through when I got home.
The rain was finally over, and things were finally looking up. I packed everything away and hopped back in the truck. I wasn’t quite sure where I was going to end up next, but the lighting was looking good which was better than how the day had started out.
When I got back on the main road, I noticed some interesting dunes off on the side of a parking area with an OHV entrance beside it. I pulled into the parking lot and started to look around. There were interesting textures, but I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to find a composition there or not. I got out and looked at things critically. I saw potential, but wasn’t sure if anything would turn out here or not. Since the morning had been a bust, I decided to give it a try so I turned the truck off and grabbed my camera with the long lens. This was going to be the best option for finding those isolations to show off the shapes of the dunes.
I started to hunt compositions by taking the camera zoomed to about 135mm to find areas that showed potential. I found a few views and got some compositions put together. I went back and forth as to whether or not I wanted these to be in color or black and white. It was one of those times when the colors worked together with the blue sky and the yellow sand. It is kind of a classic color palette, but it is also kind of boring. When I switched the camera over to black and white, I could see all kinds of contrast coming together in the scene that I loved. While I was out there, I felt as though black and white would probably win out. While I am writing this, I have no idea if it did or not. I don’t even know if the photos I shot will work at all.
I do know that I was shooting several different scenes with the dunes in hopes of getting one or two to work out. There was also a section at the entrance that caught my eye with a series of wooden pilings, one of which was holding a directional sign for traffic. I liked the arrow as it appeared completely out of place in the context that I was photographing the environment. I took that as an opportunity to create a photograph with a bit more story than what I had been capturing. I still didn’t know if I liked it better in black and white or in color. The red arrow made for a compelling argument for color, but I still liked the higher contrast of the black and white version. Hopefully we are seeing one or the other here as I really want one of them to make the cut.
When I was done with the dunes, I went over to a puddle that was about ankle deep and tried to make a few photos using the reflection. I didn’t feel all that good about how those compositions were coming out mainly because you could see the concrete walkway of the parking lot below the water. I liked the visual illusion better than the actuality, so I had very little hopes for those to turn out.
In a period of about 45 minutes, the sky had gone from cloudy to clear and the light was not doing me any favors at this point. I packed up my gear and headed North hoping to find something else to photograph. The further North I got, the more clouds that I found, and there was also a good deal of fog which was hovering above the road. It was quite interesting, and I had never really seen conditions quite like this at the beach before. This was the kind of thing that I had hoped to be able to capture being free to work scenes as I wanted to as the conditions popped up.
Thinking about the conditions, it seemed a natural fit to find a pier to work with. From my morning scouting, I had found that the Avalon Pier was going to be my best bet. It wasn’t too far beyond the hotel and that was where I wanted to go.
When I pulled in, the fog was kind of thick and I felt that it was going to make for a great mood for the images that I was hoping to create. I grabbed my bag and tripod and went to the access point down to the beach. As I was crossing the dunes, I was already taking note of the bits of fencing that were there to help protect and form the dunes. I always enjoy working with those fences and planned to come back to them before I was done. It was the pier that I was most interested in working with at this point though, and that was just what I did.
I started out on the side where I entered that had an interesting side of the main building at the base of the pier. I liked the stairs that formed a diagonal, and the bulk of the building would block the golf cart which was parked on the pier. This gave me a pleasing angle to the whole thing, and it almost looked as though the pier was fading off into the fog.
Knowing that this was my shot, I pulled the camera out and fitted the standard lens along with a polarizer to darken the water for a bit of contrast. I worked out the composition and started to make exposures. I felt that up to this point, I had been very good with my rate of photos shot over the two days. My count was still quite manageable with under a hundred frames shot. That was about to go off the rails because I was now shooting the waves in the ocean which means timing is everything and everything is left to chance.
My frame count started increasing like I was test firing a gatling gun. One after another was shot as the light looked right. I tried to time the most interesting waves, and then hope that they were in a good position for the composition. I could have easily stopped with just a few frames, but when it comes to this type of photograph, the wave position and shape means more to the image than anything else. I just kept firing frames in the hopes that one of them would work to provide me with something as close to perfect as possible.
When I finally felt as though I had what I wanted, I grabbed the camera and walked to the other side of the pier. The lighting as different over here and the wave action seemed to be a little more pronounced. I found another composition that worked, but unlike the other side, I omitted the main structure because it wasn’t nearly as interesting on this side. I was focusing more on the fog than anything.
Once I had things worked out compositionally, it was back to my game rapid fire exposures as the waves changed. The surf was coming in, so I was also having to keep track of where the water was in relation to the tripod. I’ve learned over the years that once the water comes to where the leg is, that leg will immediately sink down enough to blur a photo, and to change the frame of the composition. A couple of times, I had to move the whole rig back to avoid that.
I also had a repeat of the previous day where apparently, I attract a lot of attention when I am out with my camera. There were several folks that would come up and talk to me about one thing or another. One lady, in particular, came up and asked why everyone was taking photos of the pier. I hadn’t noticed this, but there were quite a few that had their phones trained in the same direction that I had been shooting. I explained that I was drawn to the mood set by the fog and the way that the waves looked. The pier just added that strong visual element to pull it all together.
Another lady came up to talk to me and showed me a photo that she had shot on her phone that included me. She asked if I wanted the photo. I said that I did because it was a nice one and I gave her one of my business cards with my email and phone number on it. As of the time of this writing, I have not received the photo, but she might be waiting until she gets back home to send it. Either way, it was nice that I was making an impact on others just by doing what I love to do. It was not until I returned home that she sent several photos that she had shot of me. They all turned out really nice.
Feeling that I was pretty well done with this side of the pier, I moved back to the other side with the intentions of working the fences and dunes for a bit. This is something that I always enjoy doing, but usually it is at sunrise when I am paying them any attention. It seems to make sense to me because after the sun comes up, it is bathing the fences with the warm light, and I’ve always been drawn to them in that condition.
However, with my recent education on lighting, I have found that having them backlit with shadows coming towards the camera makes for a very interesting composition. I was wanting to capture some images like this because the sun was starting to shine from over the dunes at just that angle which would work. In addition to the fences, I was also paying attention to the dunes themselves for any compositions that might pop up.
My favorite photo of the fence shots was one that I did almost at the end of the series when the sun was getting rather strong. The shadow was nice and long which prompted me to frame the image as a vertical. The more I tweaked the composition, the larger the crop got until I was including the majority of the shadow which introduced a very nice curve at the nearest part to me. The shadow essentially framed itself and it turned out beautifully. Well, at least it looks great in the first round of culling that I did in camera in the hotel room. I’m assuming that it will look even better after the edit is complete.
As of the time of me writing this part, I have seen the last of the light on Sunday and am currently sitting at nearly 500 frames on the memory cards. This is showing the importance of doing an initial cull in the camera. Now, I am not chimping, which is another way of saying deleting photos because there are always photos that look better on the computer than they do in the LCD. I’m not deleting anything unless the exposure is way off, or I completely missed the composition. I’m just going through and giving the strong images a single star now as I can go through them in smaller groups with the actual capture more vivid in my mind. My hope is that when it comes time to whittle the photos down within Lightroom, I will be well ahead of the curve.
While I was working on capturing the fences, I happened to notice some tire tracks through the sand and there was one set in particular that seemed to curve around the fences. I thought that it was a nice framing element for the fence line that was on the left. The fog in the distance added to the mystery and atmosphere which I kind of liked. There was a family walking down the beach in that direction that gave me some concern, but I think that I was able to wait long enough that the fog enveloped them and pretty much made them insignificant in the frame. I can’t see them in the image review on the camera, but if they are there, I can easily remove them with the healing tool in Lightroom. I made sure that any frames that I shot with them visible, they were in an area that I could easily remove them from the scene without any other detail lost that would cause problems.
By this time, I was feeling like things were winding down. I had been at the Avalon Pier for a very long time and I was starting to repeat compositions. Before I headed back to the truck, I took another look around. The fog out to sea was still very interesting and the pier was looking rather mysterious in those conditions. As I said, I was starting to repeat compositions, and this was one that I started to repeat. The difference was, I had included the main structure at the root of the pier the first time I shot from this side. This time, I was only interested in the pier itself as I had done on the other side. It is worth mentioning, now that I know what photos made the cut, I flipped some of the pier images based on the wave patterns so that the composition read better.
The main structure was still showing the sunlight on it which made things look a bit more upbeat than I really wanted. For this composition, I wanted to focus on the fog and the waves. The pier was just giving me a visual anchor for the image. I framed up the composition I liked and started to rotate the polarizer to get the water to where I liked it. That was when I saw it. There was a bright band in the fog which was almost like a rainbow starting to form. There was a point where I turned the polarizer that it shone clearly against the fog.
This added a whole new dimension to the photograph, and I became very excited to capture it. I worked out the right shutter speed for the waves and then tried to time my exposures to when the waves complimented the brighter streak through the fog. To be very honest, I was fully engulfed in the process of making exposures. My attention was firmly on the job at hand, not the job at foot. As I was snapping away, I could see a big wave approaching the bottom of the live view. It was coming at such a rate that I was pretty sure that it was going to wash over the tripod legs. Sure enough, as I looked down the tripod was already sinking, but the wave continued on with such force that it hit my left foot. That threw a diverted wave to about mid-shin as it washed over my boot. I now had a wet leg, but I got the shot right before it affected the tripod placement.
It dawned on me how far I have come with my gear over the years. When I first started out, I was paranoid about anything relating to the ocean when it came to my camera. Even my point and shoot was treated like an exotic supercar anywhere near the beach. Not that long ago, I would not change lenses on the beach for fear of sand getting inside of the camera body, or on the sensor. Even when I relaxed on that point, I would not have the camera close enough to the water to get salt spray on it. Even with all of the care in the world, I would immediately come back to the room and clean the camera to make it ready for the next outing. Now, here I was with a tripod five inches into salt water and sinking while the same water was washing over my feet. The camera had been in the salt spray for over an hour at this point as well. I didn’t care on that level. I knew that I was going to be cleaning it up and it has become more of a tool to me over the years. This tool is meant to be used and it might get dirty along the way. I’m still very careful with it and treat it better than most folks will treat a camera, but I’ve learned that I can put it into harm’s way a little more often without any problems. This has made it much easier to get photographs right up in the action.
I eventually got tired of shooting the pier and while I didn’t have the exact wave combination that I had envisioned, I was pretty sure that I had something that would work in all of the frames that had been captured. I wanted to try something different, and to do that, I was going to have to leave this spot. That is not always the easiest thing to do when you are still very much having fun right where you are at. However, in the interest of variety, I needed to move on to the next scene.
On the way back to the truck, I did stop to shoot one interesting section of the dunes from the sunny side. It was just a single frame and I’m not sure if it worked or not. If it did, you will see it here in this blog at some point, if not already. That photo didn’t turn out at all. It was too flat with the lighting, and the colors never seemed to mesh like I wanted them to. As I was looking at another section, I was approached by a guy who had a question that I get an awful lot. He asked me what decay photography was. It was the second time in as many days that question had been posed. If nothing else, being a decay photographer is a great conversation starter. We had a very interesting talk about photography and some other related topics.
When the conversation finished up, I started to break the camera down and put it all away before rinsing my feet and the tripod legs off in a puddle on the other side of the parking lot. It was an easy way to get rid of all the sand that was on everything at ground level. With that done, I was ready to head on to the next stop wherever that might be.
I was slowly heading back to the hotel but decided to stop off at one of the beach access points that I had located during my research earlier that morning. What made this one special was a red mailbox which was mounted to a gazebo at the top of the boardwalk. The mailbox was put there as a location to leave your hopes and dreams in written form. There are several such locations on the Outer Banks, but this one was close by, and I wanted to check it out as a potential photography subject.
Since it was on the way, I pulled into the parking lot and spotted the mailbox immediately. There was a family there sitting in the gazebo, but I saw some potential other subjects to photograph. There were a lot of the stairs leading over the dunes which always make interesting subjects in my eyes. The light was great, so I decided to go up on the boardwalk and scope out a composition. It didn’t take long and I was setting up to capture the composition that I had just formed in my head. It was a rather simple one with the stairs forming the major geometrical element in the frame. Really, the only trick was to keep the grass from blowing in the breeze. I was also trying to get an interesting sky above it, but that was proving kind of difficult. After patiently waiting for a while, I decided to go up to the gazebo since the family had left.
I didn’t see a composition that I was particularly interested in capturing of the mailbox. It seemed like everything that I was coming up with was more or less a documentary type photo and it just failed to excite me. While I was up in the gazebo though, I could see more of the boardwalks and stairs to the North. The fog was heavier in that direction, and it made for a very interesting look. In the distance, I could just barely see another gazebo which was kind of the icing on the cake. I liked having an element helping to fill the void that was the sky above.
I framed up a composition that was done vertically at first. When I finally had the exposure all dialed in, and I was happy with how things were looking though I decided to change up the framing and flip the camera to the horizontal orientation. That helped to make the photo feel less crowded and it gave a better flow to the whole thing. I imagine that is the one that I will have posted here in the blog, but that has yet to be seen as I have only seen the images on the back of the camera as of right now.
I spent some time looking around the area and even went down onto the beach for a bit to see if there was anything else worth shooting while I was here. Nothing was jumping out at me and I felt that I had captured all that I would want at this location. I was getting tired and I was ready to get back to the room.
I loaded things back up in the truck and headed back down the road to the hotel. I took the scenic route to get there, and when I arrived I could see that the sky was starting to pick up some color from the setting sun. I hadn’t been expecting this because nothing about the sky would indicate that there was going to be any color coming from the West. I guess I got that one wrong, because I could see color starting to bleed across the sky. It wasn’t a great sunset, but there was just enough color to excite me.
Since I was back at the hotel, I knew that there was an area on the other side of the dunes that would offer a view of the sky to the West without the clutter of all the buildings. I quickly grabbed my gear and made the short walk to the beach. Once I was on the other side of the dunes, I started to pick out some potential areas that I could shoot from. Of course, I focused on the fences here and loved the way that they were in a state of deterioration. What can I say, I am a decay photographer at heart.
When I finally settled on where I wanted to set the camera up, I got the composition dialed in and the exposure set just as the pink was coming over the dunes. I made exposure after exposure here in the hopes to capture the peak color. That is the thing with sunrise and sunset photography. It is hard to read the color as it is happening to know if that is the best it will be. It is also kind of hard to notice when the color becomes worse. In many cases I am still thinking that it is looking better when it isn’t.
This is probably the only drawback to how I have my camera set up. I shoot in a custom modified neutral color profile which has reduced saturation and contrast to more closely relate to the RAW image that will be imported into Lightroom. The reason that I do that is because the live view and image review all base the visual photograph on a jpeg representation of the RAW file. What is worse, the histogram reads off of that jpeg image. I’ve found that I can get a much more accurate histogram by using this custom setting, and can further check the accuracy by using the depth of field preview button, but that is a trick for another day. The downside to all of this is that the colors are very washed out, and there is little to no contrast in the photos I am seeing. I have learned to deal with it, but any time I am shooting sunrise or sunset, I am left feeling very let down by the image I am seeing on the camera. I’m always happily surprised when I get the files into Lightroom and start applying an edit to them which will allow the colors to really shine through.
I stayed at this composition probably longer than I really should have. I did eventually realize that the colors were fading, but the overall exposure was getting better and better as the sky darkened in relation to the shaded side of the dunes that I had been working with. To deal with the smaller area of color, I got in closer and zoomed in so that I concentrated on a much smaller area. This filled more of the frame with the color, while keeping the detail of the dunes in place.
While I was working on that, I had noticed that there was a group taking pictures of themselves under the interesting evening sky. One of them came over to ask if I would mind taking a group photograph. Since I was pretty much done with the sunset, I agreed and went over to where their group was. I was handed two cameras, one was a disposable film camera which really surprised and impressed me. The other was a compact point and shoot which I didn’t think anyone used anymore either. In both cases, I felt like I was shooting with some historic equipment. I grabbed a couple of shots for them and returned the cameras just as I saw that the sky to the Southeast was kicking off in a second blush.
I grabbed my camera and walked over to a location where the water was making a nice curve against the shore. I set the tripod up and started to frame a shot. I didn’t like where I started, so I moved in closer, and then closer still. Eventually, I was back in an area where it was entirely possible that my tripod was going to get overrun by the water yet again. The sky was too good to pass up though.
Ideally, I would have liked to have had a visual anchor to focus the eyes, but there was nothing that I could use here except for the textures of the waves. That was going to have to work, and it was seeming to as the images popped up on the LCD after the exposure was made. The sky was very interesting to look at, and the waves just brought in a very nice complimenting texture. The images had kind of an abstract quality to them when I looked at them in the camera, and I started to wonder why I didn’t shoot more beach photos like this. It would certainly make things easier on the NC coast as there just isn’t a lot on our beaches that add visual interest when shooting out to the ocean.
I had a feeling that these photos were going to be rather important to my portfolio because over the last couple of years the biggest selling prints of mine have been coastal sunrises and the few sunsets that I have shot. The large commercial clients love the colorful skies, and who can blame them? Since I’ve exhausted and recycled this type of image in my portfolio, I was looking forward to getting some new options. I had a feeling that these photos were going to be a very valuable addition to the catalog. Of course, if you like them, you can also purchase a print direct from the gallery store, or you can contact me for prints in a larger size or on specialty media.
Even though I was very excited about the way that the sky was looking, I eventually had to call it a day. The color was fading from the sky and the light was dropping quickly. Judging from how things were looking on the back of the camera, the color was all gone. Like I said, though, my color profile seems to give me the wrong opinion at times. The next to last image that I made was the first that got edited from this day, and it was arguably my personal favorite. I’ll share it here in a minute. Thinking that the show was over, I made the short walk back to the beach access and went back to the hotel. As the showers were not turned on yet, I had to find another puddle to rinse the tripod legs off as well as my shoes before going inside.
Now came the fun part of the day. Remember me telling you that the camera was just a tool and I was nowhere near as anal about it as I have been in the past? Well, I also understand that if I take care of my equipment, it will take care of me. Now that I was done for the day, it was time to clean everything up. That meant a full wipe down of the exterior surfaces on the body and the lenses with the front element cleaned off with a lens cloth. I charged two batteries to make them ready for the next day and put it all back in the bag clean and dry. The process didn’t really take long at all. I think I was at it for about 10 minutes for a good surface clean. I will wait and do the deep clean when I get back home where I pull the accessories off of the body to really get in all the nooks and crannies.
It had been a full day, even though it hadn’t really gotten started until after lunch. Over the past six hours or so, I had been rolling. I had shot 245 frames by this point which is a lot for any day of landscape photography. I went through and deleted those where I was showing overexposure, and a few where the composition just wasn’t right at all. I also started awarding a single star to those that I thought had promise to help with the culling process after I got home.
It was this photo right here that I loved so much and was such a surprise to me. It hadn’t received a star during that first culling, but when I got it into Lightroom, it spoke to me. The color was faint, but I loved how the elements all looked in the scene. The edit didn’t take long at all, and I was able to capitalize on the blue hour colors which just looked amazing. It was that subdued color palette which made this image unique in my collection and I was really excited about it. Toni came down to look at the initial edit and was floored by how it looked as well. I always trust her reactions with photos as she has a very good eye for what does well in my collection.
The rest of Saturday night was spent researching where I wanted to shoot sunrise on the following morning. The forecast for the morning was for partly cloudy skies with some low clouds. There wasn’t much chance of color, but I did have hopes of some interesting textures in the sky at least. With that in mind, I wanted to have a subject where I could get a fair amount of sky in the photo. My first thought was to go out to Bodie Island Lighthouse again and capture it at a time that I haven’t done in the past. My other option was to go to another pier. I still had the want to capture Jeanette’s Pier, but there were some aspects of it that I didn’t find all that favorable.
As I was looking around on the map, I came across another pier that I hadn’t considered yet. This was the Nags Head Pier and it was about four miles away from the hotel. Looking at it on the satellite image, I could tell that it was a very long pier which was something that I see as a big plus. It also looked a little rickety which is another part that I really like. Looking around the pier, I could see more fences on the dunes which would give me something to shoot after the sun came up, or if there was no color in the sky.
I was sold, that was going to be the location for the sunrise on Sunday morning. I set the clock for 4:30am so that I could be at the pier before blue hour started just in case I was met with an interesting sky before the sun started to interject too much. I don’t really like getting up that early, but that is just what I do when I’m at the beach.
With that, I’m going to call it a day on this blog. I’ll be back with part three soon enough. Chances are it has already been written, even before I have seen the photos outside of the back of the camera. I guess you can say I’ve started counting my chickens before they have hatched. The joke will be on me if I get home and none of the photos prove worthwhile. I don’t expect that to happen, but there is always that chance. I guess I will know in a few more days, and you know the answer to that quandary already. If you are keeping count, that is 21 new photos added here today. As Toni will likely point out to me, I had said before I went on the trip that I was looking to get about 20 photos out of the experience. I guess I set the bar kind of low. Toni has estimated between and 40-60, and I’m over half way there right now. I still don’t know what is to come as I have only edited the first two days’ worth of photos at this point. The edits are taking some time, so I’ll be back as soon as I can with the next installment.
Until the next entry…..
