If you ever have the opportunity to work with a film crew, jump on it! It’s a lot of fun. Its a lot of work, but its also a lot of fun.

A few days ago I received a call from Doug Gardner, the host of Wild Photo Adventures, asking me if I was interested in co-hosting another episode with him. Well with workshops spanning from now until October for me, we quickly realized that if we were going to make this happen than it would have to be RIGHT NOW. So, this week, we will be filming another show together here in North Carolina.

Without giving away to much detail on the show, lets just say that this episode may be a bit different than those of the other seasons. Hopefully throughout the week I will have time to grab some photos of the production process and post them on here and Facebook for your folks to all point and laugh at! Stay tuned. . .

One of the very first things I do once I have a magazine assignment, is put together a shot list based upon the research that I have done for the article. This shot list is basically the images that I think will best visually aid the story that I am working on. When you offer a magazine a story package, that is – both photographs and text – you want both parts of this package to be equally compelling and to complement each other. Not only are you telling a story with words, but you are also telling a story with photographs.

There is no limit to the specifics of how detailed a shot list can be. When the Discovery Channel sent a film crew out to capture white sharks breaching off the coast of South Africa as they attacked seals, they did not simply want their crew to capture a few breaches and come home. This would have been easy. A week’s worth of filming and the crew would have had over a hundred breaches to choose from. The film crew however, spent something like three months aboard that boat trying to capture the specific footage that they needed for the show.

If you sign up for photo needs lists, you will get an idea of this first hand. You will sometimes see requests for something as specific as “mature bull elephant facing camera with land rover facing the elephant at sunset. There needs to be a female photographer set up on top of the truck with tripod and large telephoto lens facing the elephant with an African driver. The elephant should appear to be charging towards the truck and dust is kicked up in the air behind it.”  Now that is specific!

For me, the image that accompanies the blog post was one that I have on my shot list for the story. I wanted an adult pileated woodpecker perched vertically on the side of the tree at the nesting cavity, head leaning in to feed the chicks, and the tail exaggeratedly braced into the side of the tree. So after two weeks of working this nest from a blind, everything lined up just right. One problem though. 15 seconds before I tripped the shutter on this, I lost my beautiful early morning side light to a bank of clouds that rolled in.

So why would I need an image so specific? Well, there are several different reasons. First has a lot to do with the angle of the tree and background limb. With the bird leaning into the cavity, this creates a curved figure that helps to anchor the composition when juxtaposed with the very distinct angles of the tree and limb that both lead off to the left. This sort of posture helps to hold everything in place. Second, I wanted the image to be obvious that the bird is leaning in to care for its unfeathered young. Third, I wanted a big emphasis on the tail.

The reason that the tail is so important is that this thing is what sets woodpeckers apart from the rest of the avian world in their ability to forage in a vertically. Out of the roughly 10,500 different species of birds on Earth, less than 100 outside of the woodpecker family can effectively perch on a vertical object. Of all the birds that can do this, the woodpeckers are the champions at it primarily because of this highly modified tail that works to in conjunction with the feet to create a stable tripod.

Birds that are able to perch and maneuver on a vertical surface tend to keep their bodies plastered against the tree much like a rock climber does everything he or she can do to keep their bodies as tight to the rock face as possible. Woodpeckers however need to be able to lean back away from the tree to chisel into the wood or peel bark. Most other birds would tip over and fall off if they tried such a feat. For a woodpecker however, this is made possible because of its modified tail that braces against the tree.

Shot lists like this are not only useful for magazine assignments and projects that you are working on, they are also a great thing to put together before any photography trip. Do you research beforehand. Know exactly what the opportunities will be where you are going and develop a list of photographic ideas that you would like to accomplish while there. This will keep you on track and shooting towards a goal instead of aimlessly photographing an area. There is absolutely nothing wrong with impromptu shots and most of my favorite photographs have been evanescent moments that I had no way of planning for or knowing would happen. With that said though, have a solid idea of what I wanted and what I needed to do to make it happen helped me be in the right place at the right time for those evanescent moments.

The adventure begins! When it comes to doing stories for magazines, you pretty much have two basic types as a photographer: 1. The kind you already have all the images for and you base a story around your stock files, and 2. The assignment kind that you need to shoot for to make the story happen. At the moment, I’m working on a story on pileated woodpeckers as ecological engineers. These are the massive black woodpeckers with giant red crests that you see all across North America. Given their size, they just can’t help but to have a huge impact upon the forest in which they live – making them both a keystone and indicator species in the ecosystem. One small example of this is the fact that there are 38 known species of animals that depend upon the pileated’s carpentry work throughout a forest for their own survival.

Which type of story is this for me? Both. I have images to use for the story. But I need more in order to illustrate the story effectively. Thus, I have been on the hunt for a couple weeks now for cavity nesting species – specifically those that utilize pileated woodpeckers cavities. Out of this two week hunt, I spent the last three days searching one of the woodpeckeriest place in the area for potential candidates. In one day alone I located a red-bellied, downy, and pileated nesting cavity as well as two other active nests that I was unable to get a glance of the bird using it. Score! Not bad for one days worth of scouting.

Over the course of the next few weeks I will be working on shooting for this story and my plan is to keep up with the progress via the photo journal. Now I know I have been a total slacker this winter with keep up with the blog. I greatly appreciate the emails that I have received asking about it and when I was going to get back into the groove again. That sort of stuff is really motivating and inspirational!

Accompanying this first post in the woodpecker series is of the pileated cavity that I found. I have located several other pileated cavities throughout this time period. Some are good, some not so good to shoot. So far, this one appears to be the best – photographically speaking that is. Only problem is the height and the angle that I need to shoot from.

Here you see that this nest requires the inclusion of the sky from this angle. Now, personally I kind of like this composition – complete with the bright white sky as it gives the image something a high key feeling. As is, my options are to re-shoot this location with a blue sky. Only problem is, once done, that’s it, little else that can be done with this nest. This is not good enough though. I need more. I need behavior, I need a cover shot – literally (the editor told me so).

Now, the best way to spice up this location is for me to get rid of the sky entirely and bring some beautiful spring green foliage into the background. Background with any wildlife photograph is absolutely crucial. This one thing will make or break your image. To do this though, I need to get myself up about another 10 feet into the air. Doing so will bring the forest up into the composition and allow me to work this nesting cavity from multiple angles and keep the viewer’s eye locked in on what is actually important – the birds.

In order to accomplish this I will need to erect a blind on top of my Suburban. Some 2x4s lashed to the roof rack with plywood attached accordingly should do the trick for a shooting platform. My plan from there is to fashion a quick blind out of thin PVC piping with earth tone or camo cloth attached to it. Obviously I am not planning on blending in here by any means. The point of the blind is simply to conceal movement on my part and help put the birds at ease. No one wants images of birds scared half to death by some crazy bearded man standing on the roof of his truck with a giant lens aimed at them. I need natural behavior. Sure, the truck and structure is going to stand out to the birds. They will most likely be quite cautious of it at first. But given an hour or two, these birds typically acclimate to such things – given me and my movements are concealed – and will return back to normal.

Other options if given the right location would have included a simply climbing stand used by deer hunters to shimmy up a nearby tree, or a tower stand with a blind ontop of it – the kind you see sitting out in the middle or the edge of fields. The location of this cavity will not allow for either of these and therefore this appears to be the best option available – all things considered.

I’m sure more than one of you are thinking – oh man, I hope he posts pictures of the blind. Don’t worry, I will!

Since releasing this image to the public I have had countless emails in regards to how I created this photograph. Obviously I needed a long exposure in order to capture the stars, color, and detail in in the lighthouse. Too long of an exposure and the stars begin to trail. Too short of an exposure and the image becomes various degrees of featureless black.

Maybe the best way start is to list off my camera settings here. Due to the low light in the scene and lack of contrast, there really is nothing for the autofocus of a camera to latch on here. So to begin with, I switched over to manual and set my focus by headlamp to just under infinity. Why just under? Well that’s one of those unique characteristics that only time spent learning your lens can tell you. I was shooting with a Nikon 12-24mm lens and I have found that I produce sharper results in situations like this when just slightly backed off from infinity.

Next, I needed the absolute most light that I could possibly get out of this scene. So, I did two things. I set my aperture to f/4 and my ISO to 2500. I could have gone higher with the ISO but I made this image with a Nikon D300 which in my opinion gets really funky at anything higher than 2500.

Now I shoot everything in RAW, as you should as well. With the D300 there is the option to shoot in 12 or 14 bit NEF files (which is Nikon’s version of a Raw file). There has been a lot of debate and testing done over 12 bit vs 14 bit since Nikon started offering this option. Some may argue with me on this, but I like to make things simple on myself. For me, 12 bit is for shooting wildlife, 14 bit for landscapes. At 12 bit on the D300 I can shoot at 6-7 frames per second. At 14 bit this drops down to 2.5 frames per second. So just looking at the fps of the camera, it’s a no brainer as to why I use 12 bit for action. The 14 bit on the other hand has been argued to produce almost imperceptible differences in quality than the 12. This is 100% true with a well-lit and properly exposed image. Once you begin to push the limits of your technology and shoot in low light situations, this is where the 14 bit NEF file really begins to stand out – especially when shot at high ISO settings like 2500. I actually have this option set in my custom menu to make it easier to get to on the fly. There are so many options in cameras now a days that I don’t have time to sit and memorize where everything is buried in the menu options. So, I just set the ones that I use a lot to a custom menu in order to pull up quickly.

As for my shutter speed I photographed this a 30 seconds. This is as long of an exposure than you can do before going to BULB and needing shutter release cable and timing the exposure yourself. This however, is not why I stopped at 30 seconds. I knew that first and foremost, I wanted to capture the stars as tiny little pin pricks of light in the sky – not star trails streaking through the night. Well there is actually a formula you can use very quickly to determine what the longest possible exposure you can use before you begin to get star trails. Some like to call this the 600 rule. Basically all you do is take 600 and divide it by the mm of your lens setting that you will be photographing at. This will give you your maximum exposure time.

As I mentioned above, I was photographing with a Nikon 12-24mm lens. I had my lens set to 14mm which with the digital cropping factor of the camera I was using would have the equivalent of 21mm on a full frame camera. How do know this? Well, I know my sensor has a 1.5 crop factor so I multiply 14 by 1.5 to get 21. ANYWAYS . . . I then take this 21mm and divide it into 600. The rounded results are 29. So, I know that beyond 29 seconds, star trails will begin to show up. A 30 second exposure then, will do just fine as a 1 second variation from this will matter little. If on the other hand I had stopped down 1 full second than obvious trails would have been created.

Now, there is absolutely no reason in the world for you to have to do this every time your out shooting. Most likely you have only small selection of lenses you will probably ever be shooting night scenes with to begin with and so all you really need is a rough idea for each one of those lenses. With my 12-24, I know that I have 30 seconds on the wide side and 15 seconds on the narrow side of my focal range. Keep it within that range and you are golden!

The same of course does apply for photography. Like the great painters, there is something of an evolution of a photograph in my mind. It typically starts out with an idea – what you hear me call the artistic vision. This idea is usually spawned from my personal experience with a location or an animal. From here, it moves into the scouting stage. Good light is hard to come by and always evanescent, so I scout my locations, camera in hand, to begin to formulate my ideas onto the two dimensional plane of a photograph. Depending upon the location, the scene may be completely static and change only with the light. In other places, such as the edge of the sea, the landscape changes with each day as wind and tides are constantly sculpting the beach in new and different ways hour by hour, day by day. In these situations then it’s a matter of either working with what you have, or waiting till the time is right. After all is said and done, after all the thinking, planning, scouting, etc. . . when you are own location working a subject, literally loosing yourself in what you are doing, a eureka moment can occur and you scrap everything you were going for and incredible things come about from that moment of clarity. These moments for me, only come when I immerse myself fully into the process. This is the evolution of a photograph.

I have been driving by these stumps on the beach for years. Occasionally I have taken the time to photograph them – usually out of necessity such as to accompany a magazine article I am writing. For the most part though, they have always just been a great story and an obstacle to getting home at night. Here on the Outer Banks, these old stumps, logs, and remains of ancient forests that can be found in places along our beaches are what we call wash woods. They are the remains of forests that grew several hundred years ago along the backside of these islands. Barrier islands however are in constant flux and they migrate landward in response to hurricanes, nor’easters, and the steady pace of rising sea levels. As storm surges overwash the island, the water transports millions of tons of sand across the island as well. Basically, the island is being rolled overtop of itself. In the process, the old forest becomes entombed beneath the shifting sands. Centuries later, quite often parts of these forests become unearthed along the edge of the ocean as waves begin the lap away that sand that has kept the intact and preserved for so long. Like I said, cool story.

This blog post is a bit different than others I have written. Instead of a one or two of the finished products, I am showing you a series of images that led up to the finish product – the evolution of the photograph if you will. Like there is an evolutionary process in how we go about creating images, there is also an evolution in how we come about the final product as well.

The image up top is, of course, the finished product. This is the culmination of scouting, a couple hours of experimenting with different compositions, and finally one of those eureka moments of thought and ideas.

Bellow you will find something of a build up to this moment. The first image you can see that I was sticking with my original plant to photograph the stumps and tidal pools by attempting to pull together a pleasing composition with patters, shapes, and reflections. The light was still high and that is specifically when you want to be doing this – that is, before the light gets good. Once you find THAT spot, stick with it and wait for the light. The second image you can see that I had completely changed gears and abandoned my original ideas of photographing the stumps and the pools as part of the landscape. Here I had moved on and found a hollowed out stump in a pool. This time, you can see that I had moved in very close with my lens. I was shooting with a Nikon 12-24mm lens at 12 mms so this composition is with my lens just a few inches away from the stump. I liked this composition much better than anything else that I had put together thus far and decided that I was going to stick it out here till dusk.

Now one thing that I like to do and I have mentioned before on here, is come up with a list of adjectives to describe what I am photographing. Whether it is a wild horse, a bull moose, or these stumps on the beach, adjectives will give you something to work with in terms of the feeling you may want to convey with your image. With these stumps, I was really hard pressed to come up with a good adjective that might convey well in a photograph. But then it hit me. These old forests are called wash woods. So why not create an image of them awash in the surf as the name implies.

As the light got lower and the sun finally set, my shutter speed dropped accordingly. By the time that I made the image above, I was exposing at 4 second shutter speeds. This is SLOW – which I wanted. And when you hit speeds this slow, water begins to not just streak but become wispy and mist like. To control the contrast of the scene, I also used a Singh-Ray 2 stop graduated ND filter to reign in the sky and let what little bit of color was actually up there show up on the sensor. I also included a black and white conversion of this image as well. I started out shooting film. And when I did, I came from the school of thought that you should begin with black and white to learn about light and tonality before moving on to color. For several years I only photographed in black and white before transitioning over to color shortly before digital.

All in all, I’m pretty happy with the way things turned out. When I was photographing to illustrate and article I did on island migration for Wildlife in North Carolina, I joked about trying to make stumps look sexy. Last night though, I think I might of pulled it off.

Sometimes you just have to roll with the punches when it comes to weather. The morning that I made these images, I had originally planned on heading out to photograph snow geese. The forecast the night before was for a slight chance of showers and partly cloudy skies. That’s not too bad and it was something that I was willing to gamble with. By the time I got about halfway to my destination however, I had been driving through a torrential downpour for nearly 45 minutes. I realized that it was just not worth going all the way out to Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge if the weather was going to hold like this. I had gotten up early for this and I did not want the trip south to be for nothing and was itching to do so some shooting regardless of the weather. So instead of geese, I headed out to one of the local fishing piers for some high key black and whites.

Rainy, cloudy, ugly days are perfect for this sort of photography . . . the key is to find the right sort of subject matter to make it work (think contrast). When shooting these images, I knew that I was going to expose and process for the sky and water to be nearly stark white, and the sky in particular to be completely featureless. So, with this in mind, all my attention then focused on finding a pleasing composition with the pilings of the pier. I did want some detail and movement in the water to help pull the eye into the scene and anchor the image. To do this, despite the dark overcast day, I dropped my ISO just as low as it would go which brought my shutter speed down to about one full second. This allowed me to blow out the sky and most of the water, while still capturing the soft silky blur of waves retreating around me.

This, like much of the work I do at the very edge of the ocean is done in chest waders. These waders keep me dry, warm, and comfortable. I don’t have to worry about getting wet. I don’t have to worry about getting sandy. Crouching down in awkward angles gets old and painful quick. I like to take my time. I like to slowly work a scene with different compositions and when you are blurring out waves like this, you want to take many different photographs of each composition because each wave will look starkly different than the last. So, instead of crouching down over water rushing around my feet and ankles for an hour, I would just assume be able to drop down onto my knees and not worry about that water, even when a larger wave comes rolling in and hits me in the gut! My newsletter this month has an article in it entitled My Top 5 Indispensable Accessories. Chest waders sit right at the top of this list with a detailed description of why and what types I recommend.

For the black and white conversions, I used Nik Silver Efex Pro 2

In my last journal entry here, I commented on how that East Coast beaches present a distinct challenge in landscape photography do to the lack of dramatic or dynamic foreground elements. Compared to the rugged coastline of California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, our beaches, though serene and tranquil, lack that same sort of dramatic flair that you find along the Pacific Ocean. Therefore, creating those three dimensional landscapes of the Atlantic coast calls for creativity, experimentation, and improvisation in order to be successful. Really though, that’s nature photography in general. I just think that coastal images here exemplify this fact more so than most situations.

Now, in the previous post I talked about using the swash of the wave to create dramatic foreground elements in your images. Waves are not the only possibilities however. Other objects exist, its just up to you as an artist to find them and learn how to utilize them. On barrier islands old tree stumps can often be found rising up out of the beach as well as centuries old trees washed up after storms. As the nature of barrier islands is to migrate in response to rising sea levels and storms, old forests that once stood along the backside of these islands become buried and entombed in sand as the islands roll over top of them. Hundreds of years later, they become exposed on the beach or otherwise dug up out of the sand offshore by massive swells.

Probably my favorite things to experiment with as a foreground element other than waves however, are shells. But not just any shells. Most shells you find on the beach are broken, small, or otherwise blasé in shape and size.  Like the average beachcomber on vacation searching for shells, I want to the big cool showy ones. Here along the Outer Banks of North Carolina, that means whelk shells. Not all beaches though are created equally in terms of finding these shells. Those of us that live here know where to go, and I will say that the absolute best places on the coast require a boat to get to. A solution to this then, is to collect your own and have a bucket or bag to work with when you need them. Some places, like Cape Lookout National Seashore will provide you with more than enough options on the beach to work with right there on the spot. If you plan your trip to the coast a couple days after a nor’easter, than you will increase your chances of finding incredible stuff on the beach my factors of 100. Shipwrecks, artifacts, skulls, shells galore, you name it. A big storm or massive swell will cough up the Ocean’s treasures – it just usually takes a couple days to get onto shore. Outside of hotspots and major storms though, most of the time great shells are few and far between. This again, is why you should just go ahead and hold on to the ones you find.

Photographing shells on the beach brings you into the realm of extreme wide angle lenses. Using these lenses however means a dramatic stretch in perspective. This means that you will find yourself working just inches away from the shells, and right down in the sand and water. You will not stay clean and dry doing this. You should probably have camera insurance as well – just in case. Joseph Rossbach likes to say that if with super wide angle lenses, “when you think you are close enough, get even closer.” Every second the scene changes. Every wave either brings an image or the destruction to your set up of shells. It’s frustrating, but it’s also a lot of fun.

Getting low, getting close, and dragging your shutter allows you to do multiple things. You bring the shells into a prominent position of the foreground. You blur the movement of the water as it washes in or out around your shells and back down the beach. And you create leading lines with those waves to pull the viewer’s eye out towards the sea and then into the sky. When the sun is setting behind you and you are working with the soft pastels of the sky over the ocean, you should consider using a graduated or split neutral density filter. Split NDs work well here as long as you have a solid line for a horizon. If you are photographing into the sunrise, than the tool may want to consider are reverse graduated neutral density filters. These have the majority of their tinting right in the middle of the filter, and then gradually fade away toward the top. When you have an extremely bright horizon such as when photographing into the sun at sunrise or sunset, this will allow you to control the extreme light along the horizon and create stunning images.

I have put three images up here, all of the same basic composition. Subtle variations are there. The primary difference here though is the water. As I mentioned above, each wave brings a different scene, each second changes the mood and feel of your image dramatically. Hopefully this will give you an idea of what I mean by that – which is one of the reasons that this sort of photography is so much fun.

So get yourself some cool shells, sand dollars, sea stars, etc . . . and go experiment!

The morning began at 4:30 am and a quick dash out the door and onto the beach. The original plan was to photograph the Quandrantid meteor shower for which I dragged my infinitely patient wife into the 24 degree frosty darkness of predawn. While she stayed cozy with a blanket and hot coffee, I scrambled to set up my equipment. The meteor shower was to be at its peak in the hours just before dawn, and the majority of the action was to be in the northeast part of the sky. As it turned out, a thin veil of clouds set to the northeast and not only obscured our view in that direction, it also reflected the light pollution of Virginia Beach. Results? I saw about 60 or so meteors, but no images.

So, instead of meteor showers, we stuck it out on the beach to shoot the ocean at sunrise and some shells. . .

All of these images were made with a shutter speed of around 1 to 2 seconds long. When trying to capture the movement of the waves as they rush up the beach, this shutter speed seems to be just about perfect in most situations for dragging out the lines and patterns in the water enough to create the sense of motion and add a touch of dynamism. Shutter speeds longer than this tend to create a glassy sheet with some texture in place of the swash. Shutter speeds up to 30 seconds or longer completely erase all movement of the ocean and it becomes a static reflective subject with some amazing artistic qualities to it. To emphasize the motion though, for me, I prefer to keep it under two seconds long.

Now, one of the issues that you will constantly run into along the east coast of the US is the lack of foreground subject matter. Without a foreground, you are destined to create flat two dimensional images. Not a bad thing if this is your artistic vision, but I would prefer for you to journey through my image. I want to pull your eye into the scene. Utilizing the swash of the waves, and accentuating their movement down the beach allows for me to not only create a foreground element to the composition, but also allows me to create leading lines that help to pull the eye into the image. In this regards then, the slow shutter speed has a twofold advantage.

The shells that you see in these images are channel whelks. Most people call them conchs, but technically conchs are a tropical vegetarian species where as whelks are temperate loving carnivores! The reason that I chose to experiment with these channel whelks as opposed to the other two species in the area – knobbed and lightning whelks – is because of the thinness of their shells. The other whelks are heavy and thick. Channel whelks on the other hand are so light and thin that the sunlight will actually shine right through the shell. I just figured this out actually and therefore this morning was my first attempt at trying to emphasize this unique trait.

The problem with these channel whelks however is that because they are so thin and light, they just get tossed around by the water when it comes in on them. I was only able to get one single image of the shells where I placed them. All others were a mixed bag of the shells tumbling around in the swash. Not to worry though. This is nature photography. Being successful at this is all about experimentation. Like playing the guitar, you experiment and build upon an idea or concept. Lesson learned here. I love the idea of the channel whelks. I just need bigger shells next time!

In the first image, I used the sea foam of an oncoming wave to help accentuate the head of the swash. This helps to give the swash a seemingly solid edge to it even though you can see the bubbles that were on the sand just before the wave rolled in. In the last image, I increased the exposure to create a softer ephemeral like image of the water rushing in around the shells.

First off, let me just say that for everyone that does not know this already, the word Corolla when in reference to the town on the Outer Banks is pronounced Kuh-rah-la! This is not a Toyota car. I know its spelled the same way, but the pronunciation is left over from our maritime heritage here on the barrier islands where you can still pick up an old English brogue in folks dialect. I know its a small thing, but its a bit of a pet peeve of ours around here.

Driving the beach this morning, I was on a mission for a little sunrise photography. A few clouds had started to materialize over the eastern horizon and at first I thought that I was going to be working with some dramatic color. Rather quickly however these clouds had broken up and wafted off leaving the sky almost completely clear. Not what I was hoping for.

Not to be deterred, I continued to drive south looking for a nice run of what we call cusps in the beach. These are the ridges and gullies you see running perpendicular to the ocean on the foreshore of the beach and are caused from a mixture of wave direction and steepness of the beach in that area. The idea behind finding cusps where that these formations have a tendency to funnel the swash up and then allow it to fan out slightly higher up the beach the surrounding area. With an ultra wide lens and a long exposure, this offers you the chance for a dramatic foreground element when does not exist otherwise.

In the distance I saw a line of clouds begging to stretch out over the ocean toward the direction of where the sun was going to rise. I didn’t think much of it at first until I realized that this was line of altocumulus clouds. These clouds are a lot of fun. As a mid level cloud they work wonders for skies in photographs. They are spaced just right to let light though and add a nice touch of drama and leading lines with landscape photography. Typically when these clouds are spotted in the morning, they forecast a front coming through later on in the day. . . which there is.

The sky was glowing good by this point, a touch of red was on the horizon, and I was still several miles too far north to take advantage of these clouds. Its possible that I may have driven a little fast to get down the beach under these clouds. . . but I’m sure the sheriff would have understood (HAH!).

Normally I like to set my white balance through the Kelvin scale manually. This morning however, knowing that the auto white balance would work wonders for pulling out the blue that was dominant in the sky on its own I decided to set my WB accordingly.

Honestly, I wish that I had a wider lens this morning. I was shooting with my 12-24mm but was doing so on my Nikon D300 which comes with a DX sensor and therefore a 1.5 digital crop factor. So, this means that even at 12mm with the lens, really I was shooting at something like 18mm when I actually wanted 10 without a fish eye. The altocumulus did their job nicely. With a wider lens, I would have been able to capture more of the swash running up and down the beach and could have utilized this as a foreground element to pull your eye into the scene even more effectively.

I did not use any filters in  creating this image – not even a graduated ND filter. In photoshop I placed some marching ants (selected) the ocean / beach as well as the upper third of the sky and lightened with curves. This helped to do the job of a REVERSE graduated neutral density filter which is designed specifically for these situations . . . that is, photographing into bright horizon line.

This morning was cold. Really it was the first truly cold morning that we have had this season with temps at 30 degrees as I drove down the beach at 4:45 am. The Outer Banks is gripped in a high pressure system for the day which predictably gives up cold nights and cobalt blue skies without a cloud in sight. Knowing that the only color I was going to find in the morning sky would be the array of predawn pastels over the horizon, I headed down south to Roanoke Island.

Mornings like these are perfect for silhouettes and invoking serenity through your photographs. Skies bursting with color in the clouds offer a dramatic flair to the landscape. Cloudless, windless mornings on the other hand will afford you about 30 minutes to an hour of some of your best conditions for creating images with a soft almost Zen like appeal to them. Reflections help, as does a somewhat romantic, or more appropriately, nostalgic subject. Hence the 4:30 alarm and hour long drive for me to this specific location.

Pulling up to the docks along the Manteo waterfront at about 6 am, the sky was still black, stars shown bright, and a handful of dog walkers worked their way along the boardwalk. The docks were slick with the season’s first frost, giving folks something more akin to a shuffle than a stroll this clear brisk morning. The weather was perfect. A strong east wind had driven the ocean up to the foot of the dunes the night before, but this morning the air was completely still.

At this time of the morning, that is, just before the sky begins to glow, 30 second long exposures are the norm. Though with my wildlife photography I photograph on aperture priority (Av for you Canon folks) 99% of the time, this time of the day I am 100% manual. When you need the utmost control over your camera’s exposure settings, there is really no substitute – especially when light begins to change rapidly.

The series of images that accompany this post are basically in order of time in which I created them – the top being just as the sun began to peak above the horizon. I am doing this so that you can see the difference in light and how quickly it changes at this time. And as it changes, so too does the feeling of the image. Once again, this is why you need to understand manual exposure so that you can keep pace with a rapidly changing situation.

All in all, I was pretty happy about the morning. There are a few new ideas and compositions that I saw while I was out there that will inevitably drag me back down the next time the weather is right. The only thing I would have done differently in retrospect, was lowered my tripod just a touch more to bring the horizon line down just a touch so as to aid the mirror like reflection of the scene.