Under-exposed Long Exposures at the Beach

This weekend, Simone and I headed away for a weekend on the South Coast at a little place called Potato Point. It ended up being a great opportunity to try out a few new things on my camera. In particualar, I was interested in trying to capture waves crashing over rocks using a long exposure. For some reason, I always appreciate these types of shots when I see other people create them, so I thought I would try for myself (see here for an example of what I was aiming for:  http://news.deviantart.com/article/121175/)

It was an overcast afternoon, which gave me a chance to snap a few shots a bit earlier than would have been possible had the sun been shining brightly. Despite this, I still underexposed my first couple of shots to make up for the fact that there was still a bit of sun about. The greyness of the afternoon didn't however create the most exciting or contrasting backgrounds.

Anyway, using my tripod, precariously perched on jagged rocks, I tried about 4 or 5 different locations over the course of an hour, and managed to come away with a few shots that I was happy with.

 

 f22, 4 secs, ISO100, -4 exp, B&W post processing

 

 f20, 3.2secs, ISO100

 f8, 1sec, ISO100

Check out my flickr Stream  for some other shots of the trip, was really happy with what I came away with.

On a side note, I have started playing about with adding borders to some of my pictures. For certain shots I feel it adds to the impact. I use a free program called "Frame Fun" (available here: http://framefun.en.softonic.com/) which is quite easy to use and can batch process large groups of pics. The borders are a bit of an overkill for the small shots on here (as Blogger automatically adds a plain white background), but they  seem to look good if you enlarge individual images.