Comments

I've had a few people ask why I don't allow comments - and given the content of my recent journals I thought I should explain before I look like a hypocrite! I always like to respond to feedback that I receive - and I'm always grateful when I have the time to reply to each person, even if it is a generic message. But as school has moved on that has become more difficult to do. I reached a point last year when I was spending too much time replying to my own work - I was missing out on the work of others which was the main reason why I joined this site. I'd rather be commenting on work that doesn't belong to me and learning through the creations of other artists. But, and this is a big 'but' - I still like to receive feedback. As a photographer I still have a lot to learn and I'd really like to hear what you think of my work. If you have any critiques please send me a note - I'd be more than happy to read it and consider your ideas / input!

The Location

This photograph was taken at my favourite spot in Nova Scotia: Scots Bay which lies on the western shoreline of Cape Split. This was taken at high tide (around 2:30PM) when the sun was out in full force and the waves breaking along the shore were high because of the wind (~2ft). The water looks like glass because it's movement has been reduced over the course of a 90 second exposure.

The Photo

Compared to other coastal shots I've captured, the set-up for this was pretty simple. An article that covers the different filters I've used can be found here: [link]

My original goal during my visit was to capture a series of old wharf posts surrounded by the rising tide (Scots Bay used to be a large ship building and trading centre, although the only remains of past structures are their support beams) - I missed my window of opporunity by about an hour so I decided to take a walk along the beach to see what I could find. At the northern end of the rocky beach is a large collection of drift wood - including this piece that had just washed ashore. It was quite long (approximately 20 feet) so I wasn't able to fit the entire piece in the frame, but the curve at the one end made for a nice composition within a square frame format.

The following is a step-by-step process of how the photo was captured;

The first thing to do was find a suitable angle for the shot and prepare the camera. I had about 5 minutes before the tide started to wash over the wood so I had to act quickly. After about 5 minutes of shooting the waves were strong enough to move the wood around so I had to pack up and head home.

The second thing to do was focusing. A key step is to find your focal point before you start to put filters on - it makes the process that much easier. I focused on the driftwood / shoreline and then set the camera to manual focus so that any accidental push of the shutter buttons wouldn't change my focal point.

The third thing to do was attaching the polarizer (made by Tiffen), a filter used to cut reflective light on shiny surfaces and in the sky. In this case I wanted to cut the glare of the water so that I could lengthen the exposure a bit. The sun was very intense and during a couple of my test shots earlier I had a few blown highlights on my camera's histogram. A great tutorial on histogram use can be found here: [link]

While I'm not concerned with creating the 'perfect histogram', I've found that it is a useful tool when I'm out in the field and can't see the finer detail on my LCD. It's nice to have information in the highlights and shadows when you bring a photo into an editing program - because it is a flexibe image you have more to work with and can 'push' or 'pull' a photograph more without losing detail at the extremes.

After the polarizer was mounted and I had found the desired setting I attached a Hoya ND400 filter on top. This filter works to cut all available light - reflective and non-reflective. This was one of the first times I've used an ND400 - it has the ability to cut light to 1/500th of it's original intensity (allowing for longer exposures than the ND8x I've been using previously). The nice thing about an ND filter is that it gives you more control over your aperature / depth of field. Before I was using ND filters I had to stop my lenses down to f22 or higher in order to reduce the amount of light. A major problem that I was running into was lens diffraction: my depth of field was increasing, but the sharpness of my photos was decreasing. Although each lens is different, most wide angle lenses perform the best (in regards to sharpness) between f5.6 and f8.

The third filter to be mounted on the lens was a Hoya ND8x - less powerful than the ND400, but it works in the same manner. When I combine the two filters the amount of light blocked at any given moment is greater then when a single ND filter is attached. I'd really like to have a second ND400, but money is tight so I'll have to wait!

The last step was to attach the TC-80N3 remote timer. I put the camera on full manual mode and set the aperature to f8. I had done a series of test shots before finding the driftwood and found that given the intense light of the mid-day sun, an exposure time of 90 seconds was best.

Photoshop Work

In contrast to my last submission, there wasn't a lot of photoshop work involved with this piece. A fellow deviant suggested that I shoot in RAW to avoid high noise levels - he was right! Even though this was 90 seconds in length and the light coming through the lens was finite, there was virtually no noise present. The noise that did exist in the flat tones of the sky was quickly erased with Noise Ninja - a noise reduction program that can be found here;
[link]

I created a custom profile for noise reduction - an 8MP Canon 20D shooting for 90 seconds in monotone RAW. The rest is history.

The final step was to bring this into Photoshop for resizing and sharpening. In the past I've used the basic 'Sharpen' command, but I've found that the 'Un-Sharp Mask' command gives better results. The edges are crisp, but they aren't as jagged as other sharpening options.

Tools

Canon EOS 20D | Canon 10-22mm | ISO 100 | f8 | Shutter: 1.5 minutes (90 seconds) | Canon TC-80N3 Remote Timer | Tiffen Polarizer | Hoya ND400 Filter | Hoya ND8x Filter | Manfrotto 190CL Tripod |