Karihola - The filtered truth

It is a day in early August, and today a fresh breeze is blowing from the west / southwest. This gives nice, frothy waves, and I go down to see if I can catch some nice wave splashes.

I find a good place where I can see the waves crashing against the rocks. The wind is constant and noticeable, so I set up the tripod extra wide and secure it by hanging the backpack in the hook below, so that a sudden gust of wind will not blow the entire thing into the sea.

I have three goals for the trip. One is to catch some proper splashes with a short shutter speed that freezes the drops in the air. The second is to experiment with the ND filter with a long shutter speed, to get a flat, dreamy sea and fluffy, soft clouds. In addition, I plan to take an interval series to make a timelapse.

I get some ok wave pictures, and move to a height, where I take a focus stacked picture with purple heather in the foreground, and try my hand at a panoramic image. I have come to learn that panoramic pictures should be taken with the camera vertical, in order to get as much height as possible. This is a challenge, because you should preferably have an L-bracket, which is almost impossible to get hold of for my aging Nikon D700. I first ordered a cheap one on aliexpress, but it was not adapted to the camera shape, and thus had no other support than the one screw hole it was attached to, which did not provide good enough attachment. I see that there are custom L-brackets for the D700 with battery grip, and I have therefore started using the battery grip to check if the camera fits in the bag when it gets higher. It does, and when I also get double battery capacity, I have started to appreciate the battery grip, even if the camera gets a little bigger and more bulky. Anyway, at the moment I do not have an L-bracket, and have to use the tilt function of the tripod ball head, which is not ideal, since the camera tilts to the side and becomes less stable.

I shoot the panorama sequence, but afterwards it turns out that I have not tightened the tripod mount well enough in the camera, so it has slipped between each image, and the panorama is thus useless. Time to order an L-bracket!

I move on, and find a nice place down by the sea with large rocks I can use in the foreground, while I try on a long exposure.

While considering whether to invest in a "proper" filter set, I have purchased two circular filters. One pola filter, and one adjustable ND filter. Although it sounds practical to be able to adjust the ND filter, it is a bit cumbersome to stack these, and I struggle to adjust them optimally. Here I probably need more training. I also find that if I turn up the density to max, I get purple color cast in the image. I do not know if this is a result of using the ND filter on top of the polarizing filter. I will probably use them separately in the future, or possibly take the leap and burn some cash on a square filter set.

Anyway, I take a series of pictures with shutter speeds from 1-10 sec, to experiment a bit. I get an ok picture with 10 seconds, but it's probably a bit too long shutter speed, so I'll probably experiment more with shutter speeds of 1-5 sec in the future.

I have taken many hundreds of photos, and returning home for a longer editing session. A slightly funny detail is that the path goes through an old bunker facility from the ww2:

Road home through here...

Now I just need to sit down in front of the pc and start editing...

Results - timelapse

It was really fun to make my first timelapse video. I first used a free program in windows, but got a lot of flicker. I then downloaded Panolapse, which is a free tool. Although the video quality in the free version is limited, it worked very well, and I managed to get rid of a lot of the flicker. We'll see if I upgrade eventually. Anyway, here is the result: