My brother and I did some travelling and camping through California, and I was determined to try some of the long-exposure approaches I’d been learning about and practicing. My night sky star trail shots taken up in the mountains did not go well—trying to set up a type of shot that you haven’t ever done before, on a dark, moonless night a half-mile from your tent down a trail while you worry a bit about bears and mountain lions? Not really recommended for your first try. I pulled it off a lot better a few years later in South Africa.
The other thing I wanted to do very badly was take some long exposures of ocean surf around rocks on the shore. It’s a cliche but one I like quite a lot. The day was foggy and dull so I wasn’t going to be getting any kind of sun-and-sea contrasts. I slapped on a bunch of filters and went to it and it worked pretty well.
The major issue, in the end, was not with the exposure time but with composition. It really made me think about how to isolate the right rocks in relationship to the look the water was going to have, particularly in the longest exposures, where it ends up looking like fog. This photo ended up being my favorite shot of the day because it looks as much like a harsh stone mountain range rising up out of foggy valleys as it does rocks with swirling tides around them.
In Maine, working on the same kind of shot but from an elevated location, I ended up with pictures that more clearly preserved the ocean-and-rocks contrasts, even at longer exposures than this one here. I think that’s as much about the camera location (well, and in the case of this one, the man in the image) as it is anything else.
What might save this entire genre of pictures from being a cliche, I think, is not so much the look of the water on a long exposure but that these expose a different kind of visual relationship between water and rock than a fast shot catching a wave in action does. In those fast shots, the wave is the star, its power and dynamism frozen for us to see. In the long exposures, the ocean becomes its averages. The water is everywhere it always is. Where it is a still pool, nothing; where it is in motion, mist. The spectacle of the extreme wave disappears.
Love these photos