Waves, reflections, and a canvas of ever-changing beauty.
It is very difficult to spend time by the sea and not get lost in the moment - hard drives crammed full of evocative images, glorious skies and moody winterscapes attest to this. However, moving away from the stereotypical ‘must-have’ vistas into which you get so easily enticed, and capturing waves in perfect detail with their relentless energy, is slightly more challenging. Yes, I have loads of very good wave shots, but ‘great’ shots are much more elusive, especially when shooting directly from the land. The prospect of donning a wetsuit and forking out for an expensive camera housing before entering the water to be “part of the tube experience”, does not immediately appeal to me, especially in the Irish climate, but I do have a deep admiration for Clark Little and Ben Thouard and their superb images.
In most cases, lighting plays a critical part in the capture process, and ideally the formation of a beautiful translucent backlit tube or barrel is dictated very much by a combination of weather, location, wind direction, beach composition and tide times. That’s quite a lot of variables, so heading out to shoot this type of capture is usually preceded by a long period of weather-watching. Even when all of these align, the sea state and amount of weed in the churn can be a last-minute snub and the result can be nothing more than a murky brown sludge – nothing is every guaranteed!
On a beautiful Sunday morning on the shoreline just past Bloody Bridge I encountered a strong easterly wind which was creating a good swell. With the waves breaking close to the shore, the air was super-saturated with spray but as the sun had moved further to the south, shooting in a more northerly direction removed the haze and created a side lighting effect highlighting the spray as exquisitely silver and gold needles in extremely finely detail.
The soft-focus sea in the foreground provided a great area for embellishing with acrylic paint whilst the fine strands of spray on the crest of the wave were finely embellished with inks. Unfortunately, the fine inking process was both a very delicate and unforgiving process and resulted in three failed attempts. After the second attempt I thought it prudent not to embellish in the foreground until the spray had been completed.
Later I would remove the soft foreground completely and focus on just the waves as another perspective. Many options and no right answer - Definitely still work in progress.
Sometimes, you get lucky, and the light and wave gods favourably smile on you; the green translucent wave with the vivid blue top was one of those captures. This translucency features naturally across the entire image, so that the later embellishment required an even more subtle touch.
Capturing the emotion found in waves is very much an ongoing project; there is so much variety and scope involved, with and without Milo. An initial attempt with a GoPro did not yield amazing results but Milo did manage to capture his first tube, something that I have yet to achieve.
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