Just to get your mind off the bugs for a bit… 😉
D800, ISO400, 1/125 sec @ f/2.8, Nikkor 50mm
beach
All posts tagged beach
It’s the “unpredictable” time here in the Philippines. The weather is unpredictable, it may change from sun into storm in under half an hour.
Today the weather’s been restless pretty much the whole time. Sun when we got into the water. Rain and heavy wind when we came up an hour later. The trip back to shore was rough, and we were already thinking that the second dive may not go. But then it changed again and we went out for the second dive, only to come up an hour later in high waves which made getting back on the vessel quite challenging. The rest of the day the wind has picked up, and the sea’s been rough. High waves, ominous clouds over the horizon, we might be in for a treat during the night.
The clouds in the sky made for a very dramatic picture and the waves rolling in on the beach added to that. I decided to go out with the camera to shoot some pictures.
D800, ISO100, 1/125 sec @ f/4, Nikkor 14-24mm
And then it did get rougher. Not completely out of the blue, but still quite sudden.
D800, ISO800, 1/500 sec @ f/2.8, Nikkor 14-24mm
And then I had to run back to dry the camera. It’s supposed to be … water repellent… Although salt water isn’t the best thing to be bathed in as a camera. I dried and cleaned it as good as I could. For now it’s still working. Hopefully it continues to.
It was one of those evenings again…
I just can’t seem to escape them here… 😉
D800, ISO100, 1/250 sec @ f/2.8, Nikkor 50mm
D800, ISO100, 1/250 sec @ f/2.8, Nikkor 50mm
Stray pets in abundance here…
D800, ISO100, 1/125 sec @ f/5.6, Nikkor 50mm
D800, ISO100, 1/125 sec @ f/2.8, Nikkor 50mm
D800, ISO100, 1/125 sec @ f/2.8, Nikkor 50mm
Scouting, driving around the area, stopping the car, getting out of the car, getting into the car, driving, stopping the car, getting out of the car, getting into the car, driving… It’s the thing you typically do only with your fellow photographers. You do that with your spouse and inevitably you’ll get to see a lot of rolling eyes and the “*sighs* NOT AGAIN??”-looks 😉
And even then there were beautiful scenes we missed, because of possible life-threatening situations we might’ve faced had we stopped (or leaned too far over the edge).
D800, ISO100, 1/250 sec @ f/4, Nikkor 14-24mm
D800, ISO100, 1/125 sec @ f/11, Nikkor 14-24mm
D800, ISO100, 15 sec @ f/11, Nikkor 50mm + Singh-Ray VariND
D800, ISO100, 1/500 sec @ f/5.6, Nikkor 70-200mm
D800, ISO100, 1/250 sec @ f/5.6, Nikkor 50mm
D800, ISO100, 1/125 sec @ f/11, Nikkor 14-24mm, 4 images stitched in Photoshop
D800, ISO100, 1/500 sec @ f/8, 8 images stitched in Photoshop
Seeing the Northern Lights isn’t a given. With the unpredictability of the weather up there there’s as much chance of seeing the Lights as there isn’t.
And considering the fact that the Lights are only visible in the evenings and/or at night, it leaves about 12 hours of daylight time to shoot other things. And besides being insanely expensive, Norway is also an insanely beautiful country. At least up in the north where we were.
Sunsets and sunrises, a part of every photographer’s portfolio wherever he/she goes (I’m privileged that I got to see the Lights in the first place, but it would be sooooo cool to catch the them at sunset…)
D800, ISO100, 1/30 sec @ f/16, Nikkor 14-24mm
D800, ISO100, 1/125 sec @ f/22, Nikkor 14-24mm
D800, ISO100, 1/125 sec @ f/8, Nikkor 50mm
D800, ISO800, 8 sec @ f/2.8, Nikkor 14-24mm
After our first day of scouting we were sent to different bar, a place which was THE place to be on a Tuesday (!). Well… The place was positively buzzing with about 5 people. So after a few drinks we headed back to the hotel, tired from a long day of driving in the rain. We did check up on the weather forecast, never giving up hope that the trip to this godforsaken country, which was called The Paris of the North, where a drink costs you an arm and a leg, would be a total miserable loss. And guess what? Out of the 5 websites forecasting the weather for the Troms area one actually mentioned a clearing up for the next day. Of course with all our hope we fully believed that one website and with sunshine in our hearts we withdrew in our walk-in closets and called it a night.
Lo and behold… We woke up to patches of blue in the sky. We couldn’t believe our eyes!
Another day of scouting ahead, and bring out the sunglasses!
Tourist information told us we would better be heading east for the night, where the sky would be the clearest. Near Tromsø things would be clouded over come evening, so no use to stick around there. So off we went, in the direction of the Lyngs Alps, a mountain range east of Tromsø, topping just under 2000 meters. We drove all the way to the east tip of the island, to Breivikeidet, there where the ferry leaves to Svensby.
It was there were we set up “camp”.
D700, ISO200, 1/500 sec @ f/8, Nikkor 50mm. A 180-degree panorama put together from 10 images.
We had plenty of time to kill before sunset and darkness, so we got acquainted with the area a bit.
D700, ISO200, 1/180 sec @ f/8, Nikkor 50mm
There was an actual beach there. I’m not quite sure how often per year you could actually lie on the beach this far north, but pretty it was. And the water… Shockingly clear…
D700, ISO200, 1/180 sec @ f/8, Nikkor 50 mm
(I didn’t position them like that…)
D700, ISO200, 1/250 sec @ f/8, Tamron 90mm macro
And some more landscapes:
D700, ISO200, 1/250 sec @ f/16, Nikkor 70-200mm
My buddy spotted a totally unexpected guest when he was standing here: a seal! Unfortunately he didn’t manage to get a good picture of it and it took off too soon. I managed to only get a glimpse of it from where I was standing 🙁
D700, ISO200, 1/125 sec @ f/2.8, Nikkor 70-200mm
And they had boats, too 😉
D700, ISO200, 1/250 sec @ f/11, Nikkor 50mm
D700, ISO200, 1/350 sec @ f/11, Nikkor 50mm
And while we were waiting for the darkness and the night to set in, which it finally did after us spending about six hours in the cold there, we saw happening what we were dreading already for a few hours. More and more clouds came in and what was supposed to be a clear night was about to go all wrong.
D700, ISO200, 10 sec @ f/16, Nikkor 70-200mm
It ended up clouding over so much that we decided to get away from here and hoping we would drive towards some lighter skies.
On our way back, for just a brief moment, we thought we saw something over the mountain range, but we didn’t capture it on sensor. It might’ve just been our eagerness…
D700, ISO200, 15 sec @ f/2.8, Nikkor 14-24mm
I’m part of the Worth1000 community and a couple of years ago I participated in a Surf and Turf competition for which the idea was to combine a land animal and sea animal into one being. Lots of hilarious things come out of that. Mine was called the Seahound and it looked like this:
Seahound
Courtesy obligates me to mention that neither of the two images I used to create the above one were made by me. See below for the two sources. I have no way of retracing who the original photographers of these pictures were. I found them through a Google search when I came up with the idea of making a Seahound. Uses like this, non-commercial, supposedly fall under the creative commons license, meaning (in short) that, as long as the user doesn’t sell the derivative image onwards and doesn’t use it for commercial purposes, it is okay to use the source images. This image ended up 8th (out of 73) in the contest, with seven even more hilarious ones going first.
Seahound sources
Occasionally I do a Reverse Image Search on my work (typically the stuff that IS my own and COULD be used commercially) through Tineye and see if anything comes up. Several times something did come up, but nothing close to the results that were returned on this particular image. Together with a good number of other images from this competition it came up on a wide variety of sites, among which websites that sell backgrounds for cellphones and such.
Dilemma, then. What to do?
This is my image, I created it. But it it’s not completely my image, because I used source images that aren’t my own. Should I pursue this? Should I find out what I can do about it? Someone out there IS making money of images that aren’t his/her.
Kind of frustrating it is. And the biggest problem is that most likely the servers that host these images are based in some obscure country where the laws in these matters aren’t taken too seriously. And if for whatever miraculous reason they would reply to emails, or if for whatever miraculous reason the websites would be taken down, then they would simply set up another website within a couple of days.
Carrying water to the sea, that would be.
So… as you’ve noticed before in some of my posts I’m a big fan of Jim Carrey, and I’ll quote that favorite quote of mine from Liar Liar again:
…so what I am going to do is piss and moan like an impotent jerk, and then bend over and take it up the tailpipe!
Usually I know it instantly.
I see things in black and white when they “need” to be in black and white. Or at least when I think they “need” to be, since that’s a personal taste matter.
But this particular image was one of those ones of which I wasn’t quite sure. And I do think it works very well in both color and black and white…
D700, ISO200, 1/250 sec @ f/11, Sigma 10-20mm
Same camera settings, converted to black and white in Photoshop with some dodging and burning in the sky
Tenerife
Roque de las Bodegas is one of the few exceptions to “my” rule of a rather unexciting Tenerife. Roque de las Bodegas in the northern most part of Tenerife has a little beach, a roquey one, and a roquey pier which seems to be used for all kinds of (crappy, ahem) purposes besides it’s main purpose fishing.
D200, ISO100, 1/125 sec @ f/6.7, Sigma 10-20mm
D200, ISO100, 1/125 sec @ f/9.5, Sigma 10-20mm
D200, ISO100, 1/125 sec @ f/11, Sigma 10-20mm
D200, ISO100, 1/125 @ f/8, Tamron 28-75mm