Low Tide at Shell Beach

On the heels of a storm in February of 2011, my wife and I decided to see what we could find at the beach. We were hopeful that the clearing storm, low tide, and light of late afternoon and sunset would provide some worthy opportunities for photography.

The tide was lower than I had expected. While Penni explored the tidepools, I explored more expansive views and discovered the location shown here. I needed a position that would best reveal the texture of the rock and capitalize on converging lines of the primary rock formations. In this case, that meant getting very close to that rock. Footing was slippery and uneven, and the tripod was a recalcitrant aid at best. Ultimately, I settled on a position with one leg of the tripod on the foreground rock and the other two on the wet rock below. With a 16mm lens, the bright sun shrinks to a less dominant role, and provides good balance to the foreground rock. The extended depth of field of the wide angle lens also records good texture along the full length of the rock.

After settling upon this composition, the next challenge was exposure. With direct sun, dark water and black rock, there was no way that a normal exposure could reveal the full range of light and dark in the manner that I envisioned. I made three exposures at f/16 for a four-stop range by varying the shutter speed, and combined the three with HDR processing.

HDR techniques were, at the time, most frequently used for effect rather than as a solution to a problem. The results were unnatural scenes that drew attention to technique rather than subject. Fortunately, HDR is now more often applied in a judicious manner and the fad and popularity of its exaggerated effects are falling out of favor. For this photograph, HDR processing yields an image that would not have been possible with a single exposure, yet there are no exaggerations or artifacts that distract attention from the subject.