Slow shutter speeds in surf & wave photography can be very challenging. Especially if you are working handheld, in the pouring rain, in a raging storm!
The waves weren’t great in the recent weeks, so in order not to completely depress and start shooting things I really don’t care about, I decided to give slow shutter speeds a go.
The stormy conditions of the recent weeks created some really messy waves on a lot of the beaches and made for a sloppy swell creating unsurfable beach breaks (around 1-2ft). This might sound (and look) miserable to the average surfer & surf photographer… but desperate swell-less times make for desperate people.
A big summer storm was moving in and it looked as though the sun was going to peek out between the dark clouds and the horizon for a few minutes before setting for the day.
I packed my Olympus E-M1 and Panasonic LUMIX 8mm f/3.5 fisheye into the Olympus PT-EP11 underwater housing and ran down into the rain.
Secretly I was hoping for the impossible: A speed blurred beach break with a golden tone in the water from sunset in the distance and maybe a lightning strike in the centre of my shot.
Yes! Hopes were high and as lightning kept striking in the distance I couldn’t stop myself from running into the shore break, throwing myself into the mess and keep on trying.
Considering that lightning is generally only visible for only a fraction of a second I needed a relatively slow shutter speed to get lucky enough to capture it.
I played around with the shutter speed (and aperture) and all the images you can see range between 1/20sec and 1/60sec. Anything slower than 1/20sec would blur the whole shot and anything faster than 1/60sec was just radically reducing the chance of capturing a lightning bolt.
For the rest my E-M1 was set to manual focus at around 1.5m and burst mode (10 frames per second). On a fisheye lens at f/7.1 – f/8 the whole image is sharp from 10cm in front of the lens right up to the horizon.
Because of the low shutter and high aperture balancing each other out nicely, ISO stayed down at native ISO200 giving me the best image quality.
In order to achieve the blur on most of my images I didn’t only let the wave do the motion but also ran from the beach towards the breaking wave and jumped into the barrel head first. Luckily the Olympus PT-EP11 housing is small and with the 100mm ZEN dome port so compact that I could get ‘inside’ the small shore break to capture the action.
In short: Just picture a guy on a big deserted beach running into small messy waves all by himself on a rainy, dark, stormy day with lightning striking every minute – over and over again…
Yes, I’ll be honest: It takes a lot of attempts to actually capture the keepers. And we all know that capturing a lightning strike framed inside a wave is not something you just go out and get on your first attempt. BUT I was lucky and actually captured the strike in one of my shots (of about 600) – not quite how I initially imagined it but for a first attempt quite satisfying. And it’s definitely enough to get me out there again in the next storm!
The things learnt from this little adventure:
- the housing buttons don’t work with tonnes of sand in them…
- …but luckily the E-M1 is very customisable and I just reprogrammed the functions I needed to buttons that were still working.
- keeper rate with this technique is a slim 5%
- last but not least: shooting in apocalyptical conditions is fun!
All the images in this article can be bought as prints (in all kinds of sizes).
I’d be keen to hear what you think about the shots – why not take a minute and leave a comment below.
Have you tried capturing these kind of waves before? Share your a link to your work below and I’ll definitely check it out. Or else send me an email (chris@chriseyrewalker.com) with your images or a link to your work.
Chris,
eccentricity + high voltage = really cool exposures.
I can only imagine if someone saw you out there, and what they may have thought.. Life in the day of a photographer can be exciting. You’re clearly onto something! really wicked shots.
Thanks for the kind words Liam,
Yes you are right, not quite the usual time and location to find a photographer doing his work.
Chris
Nice work Chris,
I think the curves the waves create are fantastic, the greenish hues (apocalyptic?) are really nice and the slow shutter speed with infinity focus that captures the clouds in focus are awesome.
I’m sure every avid photographer understand what you mean when you attempt to describe how we should imagine you constantly jumping back into the water all alone. I think the results are worth all the odd-looks you may have received.
Michael
Thanks for the kind words Michael,
luckily the beach was pretty deserted and not too many ‘odd-looks’ were received 😉