ALL AT SEA
By MICHAEL PERKINS
MY RECENT RE-LOCATION TO CALIFORNIA has, in just over a year, already informed my photographic work, especially since I live largely near the Pacific coast. As just one example, my entire attitude toward landscape work has been re-jiggered, mostly due to the fact that I have near daily access to the ocean, which, as either subject or backdrop, seems ever new to me. I was never a “landscape guy” in any committed sense, my passion being concentrated either on street scenes or abstract patterns, which, in architecture, also centered me in cities. Being newly entranced by an area of photography that I always thought of as auxiliary rather than essential, then, requires me to be a lot more deliberate in choosing projects or compositions. It’s easy to get to the beach; it’s harder to get the beach, if you like.
You can see the effort here. What you can’t see is actual planning toward that effort.
One thing I learned pretty fast, and that is that I need to become more of a technician when it comes to even exposures that include say, the brighter surfaces in the sea. It takes a mortifying amount of practice to program either me or my camera (or both) to get balanced shots. The scene shown here is a great example of what I must absolutely not do, and that’s to trust my camera to either full auto modes or a semi-auto setting like Aperture Priority. I simply come away with too many blowouts on the waves, which, as we all know, are unfixable in post. You cannot recover detail that you didn’t capture in the first place. Underexposures can sometimes be mined for additional information, but a whiteout is a whiteout, and, in fact, you can make the entire frame worse by going overboard to fix an unfixable situation.
Shooting this image on full manual and adjusting the histogram for better balance throughout would obviously have prevented some of the damage, but, in a rapidly shifting scene (something that is a constant with “active” landscapes like water) I have ofttimes succumbed to the ease and speed of auto shooting, usually to my regret. And so, as I evolve fully into Beachcomber Boy, I need to re-school myself on all the lessons I have not had to draw upon for most of my recent work. As stupid as it sounds, there is no substitute for actually knowing what you’re doing.
thenormaleye 