A Dope Weekend: Part 2

Hey so this is my second part of 'A Dope Weekend'! Since the last section was on the hockey, this section is on the photography part! So I had been researching even MORE long exposure stuff, and came upon some beach long exposures. These looked crazyyyy but I didn't really know how to do them. So I ended up finding a solid description, and it ended up being a Nikon article (and you all know I dislike Nikon). So this article gave me a good description on long exposures with water as well as any type of long exposure. Another good article on the Nikon site is the article that's strictly on water exposures, which is what helped me the most with the shots I took. What I learned the most was about the ISO and the f stop. These two things did the most for me in my shots. So here's my account of taking beach pictures in SoCal.

Issues:

Well I thought I might as well tell you the issues I had first because well, there were a few. One of my main issues was pretty obvious. What's one thing that's all over the beach? Sand. Sand has always scared me with cameras for a few reasons. Sand always gets in the worst places; including the lens or the internal parts of the camera. Sand will ruin your camera and your lens pretty quickly, so you have to make sure to be super careful around any type of sand or dirt. Water was also an issue while I was trying to get some shots underneath the pier. Waves would spray up and I nervously tucked my back around my camera so it wouldn't get wet. By the end of the day I was pretty wet, but it was all worth it. One of the last issues I had was waiting for people to move out of the way to get the right shot. To be completely honest, people are OBNOXIOUS. Like if you see me with my eye up to the camera, you could at least quicken your pace so I don 't have to wait for three hours to take a single picture. And the worst part is that there is a CONSTANT flow of people walking by, so it's very frustrating. Other than having the issue of sand, water, and people, the beach trip was turned out to be very fun.

Achievements:

A lot of things went really well for me this weekend on the beach. For one, the long exposure shots came out pretty good, and there were a few that I really enjoyed. These came out well because of the websites I told you about earlier. If I had no previous knowledge on beach long exposures, then I would've failed miserably, because there were some settings I used that I wouldn't have guessed of using. These settings had to do with mainly the f stop, but also had to do with ISO and things similar to those. Even though I had some previous knowledge, I still had to experiment quite a bit with the exposures. I realized that you had to take the shots wayy later than one would have expected. In example photos these shots seemed to be taken right at sunset but in reality they were taken almost an hour after the sunset. So after all this talk, I'll show you how they turned out!

This looks like a water color painting to me....

The photo above was the second photo I took under the pier, and it turned out better than the first one I took.

This seems really edited but it's not...

I took this photo before I took the shots under the pier. Even though both of these photos look as though they were taken right at sunset, they were taken almost an hour after sunset. This was a fun shoot, so I hope you guys liked the photos as much as I do! My next blog post will most likely be on hockey so I'll talk to you soon!