Seascape

Yesterday I decided to take the kids to the beach and see if I could get some sunset photos also. I like seascapes, but have not taken too many so I figured it would be a good time to get some photos of sliding rock in American Samoa. For this photo I used my 17-85 lens that came with my camera. At 17mm, it takes some nice photos and at the time I wasn't sure if I was going to take some close up of the rocks so didn't bring my 10-22 wide angle. I could have brought both but I hate switching lens at the beach. Now when shooting these types of shots you will quickly find that since the sky is much brighter than the foreground, if you expose for the sky, the rocks will be too dark. If you expose for the rocks, the sky will be blown out. In order to expose this properly, you have two choices. You can expose one shot for the foreground and another for the sky and then combine the two in photoshop. Or, you can use a graduated neutral density filter (GND as they are commonly called). I prefer to do as much as I can with the camera so I use a GND. You can google and find out a lot of information on using GNDs so I won't spend a lot of time explaining. I always use a tripod since I am using a long exposure to get the water soft (can you believe in this photo there were 2-3 foot waves breaking - the long exposure smoothed them out). In this case I believe the exposure was 25 seconds at f22. I also use a cable release. With the camera on the tripod at 17mm I also put the focus in manual and set the focal point at 10 feet. This hyperfocal distance (see previous post) ensured everthing from my foreground to the background would be in focus. I also used the histogram on the back of the camera to ensure I had no blown out highlights. This website gives you some good information on understanding your histogram on your camera. If you are shooting digital, it is important you understand the histogram. http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/understanding-series/understanding-histograms.shtml

I hope you found this information useful.