Life in Detail

This morning, I headed out to Wick Beach to do some macro work, and to follow up on my slow-time experiments of yesterday. The day is a foggy one, with very little surf to speak of, so rather than head north up the beach, I chose to go left, south past the Interpretive Centre to where there are some rocks to explore, and where there was at least a chance of some water movement.

Today, I'm using my larger Variable Neutral Density filter, which as you can see in the photo below, kinda dwarfs the Sony NEX 7. It is a 77mm filter, although in actual fact, it's more like 82mm so that it doesn't vignette the image. All the Sony lenses take filters of 49mm (a decidedly odd size), so I mount it using a series of step-up rings to get it fit.

This VND is quite a bit higher quality than the smaller one I was using yesterday, and doesn't cause the horrific colour cast, so at least that part of the previous day's issues are solved. I ended up setting my aperture to f16 and rotated the VND to give a shutter speed of 5 seconds at ISO 100. Here are a few more examples:

 

As I shot, an eagle circled overhead, and I had the company of a group of seals just off the nearby rocks who would pop up their heads and watch what was going on on the shore.

The next order of business was to do some macro photography, for which I use a Voigtländer 75mm f2.5 lens with a Raynox M250 screw-on magnifying lens. It's not as good as having a proper dedicated macro lens, but, it's what I have, so that's what does the job! The beach surrounding the rocks at this end of the beach are littered with thousands of shells, and just sitting in one place, I can find dozens of interesting specimens to photograph. Add to that the small, and downright tiny flowers that grow tenaciously upon the rocks, and there's no end of interesting material.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As I prepared to leave, I took one more VND image across the beach toward a group of surfers looking pretty much in vain for waves. I like the surrealistic feel to it.

That's all for today, from the edge. Cheers!