Here’s another photo from El Matador State Beach near Malibu. This photo was taken a little earlier, about a half hour before sunset. I love the way the warm yellow sunlight glows on the rocks and creates a pleasing color contrast with the blue sky and water. Even though it’s a very simple composition, I like the subject, the balance, the sense of motion of the waves and the color contrast.
There are two technical issues worth discussing on this photo. The first is obvious – the movement of the water is blurred which give it a soft, foamy appearance. Generally, when you’re photographing moving water you want to use as slow a shutter speed as possible to create the soft lines. In this case, I used a shutter speed of 1/5th of a second which was just barely long enough. Obviously, you need to use a tripod to hold the camera steady. Then it’s just a matter of waiting for the waves to wash in and take lots of frames. I find it hard to predict exactly what I’ll get with each exposure.
The other technique is using a graduated neutral density filter to balance the foreground and background. A graduated ND filter is usually square or rectangular, and half of it is a somewhat dark shade of gray so that you can position the dark portion of the bright part of the image. It’s especially useful when the sky is bright but the foreground is dark, or in a shadow. I find I use one on at least 80% of my landscape photos.
