As my shooting buddy & I planned our weekly Saturday morning sunrise adventure, he mentioned that the waves were picking up on the eastside, which instantly perked my ears up! As you may have noticed in my IG feed, I started to post wave images again with the same technique of dragging the shutter. I deviated from my normal long exposure compositions to trying to capturing the waves in slow motion. I tend to get bored with just shooting my “normal” long exposures & to keep me from falling into a major burnout I shoot something completely different! It’s either shooting environmental portraits with models or long exposure abstract waves, which I discovered last year in July/August. It’s not the 1st time it’s been done but it was a 1st for me, undiscovered country & keeping the wheels turning upstairs!
I went back to shooting waves last weekend but there was something missing in the shots, it was flat! At 1st I couldn’t figure it out but as I scrolled through the thumbnails I realized that for the wave images to come to life I need color, that golden light of the sunrise & the iridescent blues of the ocean. So from my location at Sandy’s last week the sun had pushed back too far towards Makapuu & I had a hard time incorporating the colors into my images. So this week Saturday I moved farther up the coastline praying to be in the right spot as the sun broke the horizon...which I was! Planning can be a crucial part of a successful shoot! However with that said things can go wrong in a blink of an eye, especially when dealing with Mother Nature & the weather, so take everything with a grain of salt & be ready to make compromises!
Another setback I experienced on Saturday was that knowing that I was going to use my 100-400mm lens, I forgot to swap out my ballhead with my gimbal. It was rough panning & shooting while looking for that perfect wave, but I did manage. Another plus when shooting with a long lens is that I don’t have to move into the water to get that foreground element closer to my lens, I can stay farther back on the shoreline & stay dry, except for the salt spray! The long lens also allows me to compress the background elements to bring them close to my foreground subject, an added bonus!
Aloha a hui hou my friends!
www.ryansakamoto.com
Copyright 2018 Ryan Sakamoto, All rights reserved
Sunrise from Sandy Beach, Hawaii
Fine Art, Long Exposure, Wave Photography
Sony A7R III | 1/6 sec. | f/8 | ISO 50 | Sony FE 100-400mm GM OSS
Edited in Lightroom Classic & Photoshop CC 2018
Copyright 2018 Ryan Sakamoto, All rights reserved