Photography art for Sale Photographing Waves on Papohaku Beach|Photography Art Gallery Neare Me

My First Wave at Papohaku Beach on Moloka'i

Last month I had the privilege and pleasure of co-leading the Creative Photography for the Soul Workshop with my friend and great photographer, Jack Davis. It was my first time on Moloka'i and my first time in Hawaii, so everything was exciting. I was a kid in a candy store!

Our group was extraordinary as was the entire week in so many ways, but of all the things we saw and did, photographing waves at Papohaku Beach truly captured my imagination.

Having visible pics of these waves made via different photographers, I turned into searching forward to being at the seaside and experiencing the waves for myself.

When we arrived, it was late afternoon. The sun was getting a little low in the sky and the waves were rolling in. Being a landlocked landlubber, I am unfamiliar with the behavior of waves. I was surprised to learn that they came in, well, waves !

About every 5 to 10 minutes, there'd be another wave of waves. After a while I learned to watch them form and anticipate when they would break. It was in this window between swelling and breaking that the best formations were created. Like snowflakes or finger prints, each wave was unique and no two broke in the same way. Some rolled in on themselves, while others created rows of curls, or spewed spray in a multitude of directions.

Then there has been the mild! Each wave not only behaved ? Finished? ? In a different way, but every danced differently with the mild. Sometimes the mild proven via the waves, on occasion it created reflections, and every so often it became the droplets of spay into golden pearls.

All this variety intended that I could have stayed for hours!

The images demanding situations were numerous.

1. The waves have been a ways off, so a protracted lens became necessary. I used my a hundred-400mm on my Fuji X-T2.

Because of the way the waves moved and the need to follow their movement, I found that I couldn't use a tripod; I had to hand-hold my long lens.

Part of the goal was to stop the movement of the waves, so, I worked in shutter priority and set a fast shutter speed of 1/2000 of a second.

Finally there was the ISO. Because the light inside the wave was always changing, and because the wave happened quickly, leaving no time to adjust settings on-the-fly, I set my ISO to "float." This is a custom setting on most cameras. On the Fuji, I set the ISO to float with a maximum sensitivity of 5000.

I set the Fuji to shoot low non-stop. I discover that (with the Fuji besides) excessive non-stop will fill the buffer and you may be waiting earlier than you could take the subsequent shot.

My quality pictures ended up being made with settings in this ballpark:

• Focal length 400mm (in 35mm: 600mm)
• 1/2000 sec
• f/9
• ISO 5000

Rarely is an ISO of 5000 desirable, but it was necessary under these circumstances. Fortunately, the Fuji does a great job of handling noise caused by a high ISO. What little noise there was, I eliminated by running Topaz's AI Clear on the file with great results.

Here are a few more of the photographs I made that day. I procedure all the RAW files in Topaz Studio using lots of Topaz modifications. I locate the waves to be extremely outstanding, liquid sculptures that could be the foundation for such a lot of kinds of artwork created with the aid of human beings. Chihuly glass comes to mind. I can't wait to be in the presence of this elegance again next 12 months!

Jack Davis and I will be co-leading the Creative Photography for the Soul Workshop  again next year and would love to share this experience with you. You can read about it here.

Until then, Happy Holidays, and preserve on developing!