421 - Playa Arbolito
If you're a photographer that loves "documenting the scene," today's shoot is gonna piss you the fuck off. I'd recommend skipping this one, for your own sanity.
OK. Now that the freaks have left, today's adventure was at Playa Arbolito in Baja California.
The goal was to explore Parque Nacional Cabo Pulmo, which is basically an underwater National Park. I also just so happens to contain some of the best reefs in the world. We obviously couldn't miss it.
The thing is, we blew our boat tour budget at Bahía de Loreto, so we didn't have money to spend on a fancy expedition. Our next best option was to find reefs accessible from the main land, which lead us to Playa Arbolito.
To get there we drove our oversized Mercedes Sprinter down one of the sandiest roads I've ever been down. It was kind of like that movie Speed, where if you start driving below a certain speed a bomb goes off. Except for us it meant getting our wheels stuck in a sand patch in the middle of nowhere. Not that we're strangers to being stuck in the sand (it's happened 3-4 times in the past,) but it's a major pain in the ass.
Yet we somehow made it through unscraped, because Haley drives like a goddamn hooligan. It was quite impressive, really.
Once we got all settled at the beach's campground, we took a good look around. At first glance, the waves were absolutely insane. The wind was coming in STRONG, and there was no way in fuck we were going to snorkel today.
But it was chill... Usually mornings have tamer waves, so we decided we'd do our sunset shoot on the shoreline tonight and swim in the AM.
The first thing I noticed when walking around with my camera was all the coral washed up on shore. It was literally EVERYWHERE, and hardened from (calcification?) I don't know, I'm not a scientist.
Either way, the stark white chunks were absolutely beautiful... I need them in a shot somehow. So I searched around for the biggest chunk I could find, and found a clunker that took two hands and my back to pick up.
Since it was awkwardly washed up in the sand, I found a nicer spot for it in the tidepools, surrounded by rocks with a leading line. Now I just had to wait for the perfect wave to hit...
...which turned out to be the rest of the shoot. I sat there for about 45 minutes just watching waves hit it. It was super relaxing. Oh! And I found my new favorite shutter speed... .4 seconds. Check this shot out:
“Duo Land”
Taken on Sony a7rIII + Tamron 17-28mm f/2.8
[ISO 100 ~ 20mm ~ f/16 ~ 1/4s]
(Want a Print? Get one here.)
At first glance, the shot looks pretty much like a one and done. But let me tell you, a lot of shit went into this baby. First off, the water is from THREE different shots. The waves in the ocean were one shot, the main circle surrounding the coral was another shot, and the leading line in the very front was also a different shot.
I exposure blended all three to get the best of all worlds. This was a first for me with seascapes. I always knew it was possible, but I never got the chance to try it out myself. It's extremely easy... the water blends like butter because water's so fluid. You just got to know how to align your layers and create a basic mask in Photoshop.
So that was my first lesson of the day... Don't be afraid to blend the best parts of the water from different shots all into one! I'll probably be doing this a lot more now.
In addition to that trick, the main technique I used to shoot the waves was what I learned at Wreck the Peter Iredale. AKA put the camera on a time-lapse mode that takes one shot every second so you don't have to time the waves with your finger.
But I actually REFINED this lesson today... At first I was shooting 30 shots every 1 second, and just sitting back waiting. But in the process, I was also taking a lot of unnecessary photos, because I only cared about waves that hit the coral. My card was filling up FAST with dumb shit.
To make this more efficient, I made my camera take 7 photos every one second, but only when I saw a potentially big wave coming for the coral. This got me the water kick, the fill up, and the pull back. Now I was getting bangers without having a million dud shots between them. Plus it felt more involved than just sitting back watching a timer do all the work.
Doing this makes a huge difference in post-production time. Sorting through ~700 photos can easily take me 20-30 minutes, especially because I'm indecisive.
Oh one more thing... I also did a sky replacement in that shot, with a sky that was about 300 feet to the right of this backdrop. I loved the cloud, but it wasn't in the actual shot with the coral, so I moved it over.
So yeah, like I said, if you're the documenting type in the photography world, this shot just about broke every rule out there.
Oh well. I had a good time.
I’m on a mission to explore as much as humanely possible.
Want to see my progress? Check out the Adventure Map.
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