A Restart and Reconnection

Every so often the camera which is in your hand and the scene make a connection. The camera comes up and in 1/60 of a second an image is taken. Without stopping you shoot several more shots.  Often with a pause waiting for the action to start again.

A few Saturdays ago I was lucky to make that small connection with my camera and the scene. While walking on a beach, I encountered three young men on surf boards. What was great was the tide was going out, and the surf while small was close in. This put the action well within reach of my X-200 zoom lens.

This is one of my 1st shots of the day. All I did was crop it slightly and change the light setting slightly.

Uncropped

Cropped and a slight color adjustment.

Sometimes one is just lucky to happen across a scene. This day I found these three surfers close in to the shore. The end result was something any amateur photographer should be happy with getting. The shots were done in groups of three and four shots. The delay was the result of my Nikon D60's speed limitation on writing to media. Not my choice and I tried to work around it. I missed some of the shots, but still I got some good action shots. The shots of the surfer in air and at start of an inverted 360. 

Below was the fourth of four shots. The surfer just started the upside down rotation and was completely in the air.

Starting an inverted 360 rotation

A few shots of riding the wave, and even a bailout shot

Surfing close to rocks just to the left

and 

Here are some of the shots I took for art reference of the waves and surf.

I shot about 150 shots in just an few hours. And got maybe 12-14 good to better shots.  A few very productive hours.

  

Most of the shots will need to be cropped and a slight adjustment of color and contrast. A few didn't need much at all for my purpose.

After years of not feeling connected the the camera, it came alive for a little while. The water had that frozen effect and the surfers had the feeling of being on the edge of danger. They were surfing right on the edge of large and sharp rocks. For a few minutes I felt the thrill of a professional photographer making world class images at a surfing event. 

When I got back to the RV and downloaded the images to the laptop, I looked at them with the more critical eye. 

Good enough! I proclaimed.

I feel there is one or two images which might be worthy of printing and entering in amateur competition.

Later that evening I had made plans to try to capture an image of the Sun setting behind the lighthouse in the image below.

Lastly I used a program called The Photographer's Ephemeris to help locate an ideal place to try to catch a sunset behind this lighthouse.
Below is the printout which came from one of my favorite programs.

The legend is fairly self explaining. 

The map shows the bright orange line starting as the drop pin and disappearing in the left hand corner. I need to be someplace along that line at sunset. The bottom gives all the important times you might need.

The results of preplanning can give idea of a position which would work to capture the image you see in your mind's eye. However the weather didn't co-operate. As you can see in the following picture a dense cloud bank started coming in as the sun neared the horizon.

Sunset at Pigeon Point Lighthouse

I also should have moved to the left about 200 feet and would have done so but the sun disappeared into the fog.  

The Photographer's Ephemeris is copyright by Crookneck Consulting, LLC
The TPE can be located here.

The web app is currently free of charge. The IPad and Iphone apps are worth the money in my opinion. I have no connection with TPE or Crookneck Consulting. I just use their tool.