LEARNING SEASCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY
This video is from the north coast of Madeira in Porto Moniz, a place where I recently watched a video from Nigel Danson doing some seascape photography. I bought his book ‘Seascapes’. I very highly recommend getting and having a look at that if they're still available.
Seascape photograpghy was a sub genre of landscape photography which I hadn't really done any practice on. It was time for me to practice, so what did was steal his location and some of the tips that he shared in his video and try and put them into practice.
THE EXERCISE I SET MYSELF
I really wanted to recreate an image that Nigel Danson had previsouly done. Some landscape photography purists might say “why don’t you find something unique yourself” and to that I say b0ll0cks!! I’m all for creating your own art, but that’s not what I was trying to acheive here. My main aims were:
Practice long exposure and work out the best shutter speeds to get different effects
Play with my new set of ND filters to see which ones work the best
Have fun with my new camera
Take all the images home and make a composite image, as seamless as possible
In the end, I want to say “I can do it, and I understand how!”. Once I had practiced those skills, then I could go out into the big bad world and try and create some unique seascape images of my own. But for now, I’m playing the role of student!
The photograph from Nigel Danson that I was trying to re-create
SHUTTER SPEEDS FOR SEASCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY
I got an idea of the sorts of shutter speeds I needed to create nice textures in seascape photography, however I needed to experiment on location. I had always made the mistake I see alot of other photographers making which is keeping the shutter open for too long and in doing so loosing texture that would make the image more interesting. Here’s what I found to be the best shutter speeds for seascae photography:
FREEZE FRAME SWEET SPOT - 1/1000 of a second and faster
TEXTURE SWEET SPOT - between 0.25 and 2 seconds, depending on sort of how fast the water is moving
GHOST WATER - 30 seconds and above
The fastest shutter speeds will freeze the water in that moment, showing all the droplets and spray, great for stopping the waves in time. Be careful not to over expose here though as doing so will mean you could lose a lot of detail.
The texture sweet spot is what I always used to miss. Shutter speeds between 2 and 30 seconds is no-mans land and where lots of photographers mistakenly end up. Keep your shutter within the texture sweet spot to maintain some lovely texture in the water, easy to bring out in post-processing.
Lastly, the ghost water effect. Use this if you are really going for a minimalist look and want to get rid of any texture, show absolutey no movement, and turn the water into an ethereal fog.
ND FILTERS FOR SEASCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY
This is going to be difficult to recommend, becuase it all depends on what time of day you are shooting, the weather conditions, and direction that your camera is facing… none the less here are some gerenal recommendations for ND filters to pack for seascape photography:
NO FILTER: Blue hour and the crack of dawn you may not need a filter, and can acheive the texture sweet spot by just controlling the aperture
3 STOP: Early sunrise and late sunset, or a very dark cloudy day for texture sweet spot
6 STOP: Anytime of day not already mentioned above for the texture sweet spot
10 or 15 STOP: Any time of day for Ghost Water only. Do NOT use this for the texture sweet spot unless your scene is INSANELY bright.
The last bullet point is the mistake I made. In my bag I had a 10 stop filter, and even if the normal exposure was 1/8000s, that would equate to 1/8s on a 10 stop, or 4 s on a 15 stop filter. Most likely, the ambient outdoor light wont necessitate a 1/8000s shutter speed, therefore you will be pushing the ISO to bring down the shutter speed to 0.25 to 2 seconds.
THE RESULT
The important lesson I learned from this experiment is, is how to create these these lovely textures and these where the water's moving. Taking a look at my final image, even on the left hand side where you can see the wave has been crashing. I've got lovely textures not just in the rocks but in the sea as well.
Tony J Hughes - Composite Seascape from Porto Moniz, Madeira
To quickly summarize my process of learning landscape photography:
Choose a photo that you really want to recreate, and if you're lucky enough to travel to that location or travel to a location that’s similar
And this this one is more of a 1A than a 2… Watch Nigel's video from Madeira and get some really great tips about seascape photography! [WATCH IT HERE]
When you're on location, get there in good time and set up early. That is key because you don't want to be rushing yourself when you're trying out new techniques. You want to give yourself a lot of time just to have a play around with different settings, shutter speeds, filters, just so you can try everything out
Remember the three different shutter speeds that I talked about above
Properly cue rate the images that you've taken. I took hundreds of photos while I was on location there for about an hour and a half. You really need to take the time and go through the photos and try and pick your best ones.
Spend plenty of time playing around with a stack of images in Photoshop. I spent a lot of time doing this. It is a trial and error process, and so you want to spend a bit of time to try and make the blend look as natural as possible.
Tony J Hughes - Port Moniz - Madeira
