Well . . . I think I am past the point where every picture I take has to be trotted out and uploaded. Yesterday the Photo Troupe went out to the beach behind the Ventura Marina, late in the afternoon (3:30 pm to be specific), parked itself at a jetty, and got to work. I took gobs of photos, but only a few were any good, or worth editing. Some pictures I edited in different ways, from subtle color movement, to dramatic HDR, and finally black and white. My main focus was composition of ocean and rocks; for the birds, I just ran around chasing them with a long lens.
My first attempts at really long exposures on water, using an ND10 filter, ended with my camera toppling into the sand – luckily not the ocean! – and getting a lot of sand on the filter. The filter was saved, set aside, gently brushed off, and cleaned with lens cleaner. However, the one picture I did get, while not particularly dramatic in contrast with the roughness of the rocks and the smoothness of the sea, was worth saving. The lens I used was the Tokina 11-16mm, which is wonderful for taking dramatic shots – but hard to use with refinement, simply because it is so wide.
One thing I totally forgot was I can change my iso settings on the Nikon! It does a really good jobs at high iso, so as the sun went down, I pushed the iso from the 100 I used earlier in the day, to 1600 toward sunset, and using a Tamron 70-300mm lens at that – but it was a grrr moment that made me remember that, when all my pictures were horribly dark.
Although I live in Southern California, the coast is damp and chilly, oftentimes very windy. The salt air clings to everything, and I end up feeling sticky and damp, even if I am not. All of us were shivery, with fingers capable of doing very little. Luckily, there is a rather nice cafe that serves excellent hot chocolate, so we ended up there before returning to our lives elsewhere.
Ink, Yarn & Beer 